Persuasion
by Melee
Summary: A decade after Talpa. A story about Rowen, plus sexual tension up the wazoo. Yaoi. Het. Mia. Rowenxvarious. revised.
1. the drunk girl and the picture frame

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

Note: The story you're about to read has been extensively revised, and very little of it will be recognizable from the first draft besides setting and the general plot. I hope you enjoy it because I finally know how the damn thing ends. Kind of.

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**Persuasion - prologue**

**----**

Mia tripped against his back while he was trying to find the light switch. The apartment was dark in the middle, between the hallway and the moon. Behind him, light from hallway stretched his shadow and that of the lean woman behind him into stringy caricatures. Mia giggled, hiccupping into his coat while her fingers crawled around his waist, tangling in his shirt to shore up her unsteady, drunken balance.

"Hurry, hurry," she mumbled, and her scrambling fingers managed to find that special place on his ribs, so he was suddenly twitching away from her hands and laughing with her, almost against his will. He found the switch. The light overhead flickered to life.

"There," he said, pushing the door closed behind him.

"Messy, Rowen. Very messy." Mia stepped away from him, fisting one hand in his coat as she tried to kick off the tall, delicately heeled shoes she'd worn to the reunion. She faltered, and her ankle bent gruesomely sideways, though Mia didn't seem to be bothered. Rowen looked at the apartment instead, its near emptiness and the clean dishes stacked neatly beside the sink.

"It doesn't look messy," he said, trying to sound hurt. He wasn't a very good actor, finding that he didn't care about much of anything as a drunken fool. Mia tossed her second shoe next to the first in the middle of the entrance. Rowen foresaw himself tripping over those in the morning. He felt Mia's hands on his wrist as she clawed her way up his arm until she stood upright, no longer matching his height without her shoes.

"Nostalgia," Mia said breathlessly, smiling at him. Her hair was tangled, coming out from the bun she'd wrapped it into at the back of her head. Sweat matted the hair to her neck and some of it was in her mouth. "All grown up and cleaning your kitchen..."

She tripped again, and he caught her body above her hips, noticing for the first time that she was wearing Ryo's old coat from high school. The ratty corduroy interrupted the dangerous sex appeal of the sleek black dress against her skin, and Rowen told her so, half grinning as he said it. Then he asked where she'd found it because it seemed more polite than asking why.

Mia rested her cheek against his shoulder with a sigh and answered the question he didn't ask, for the first time sounding less than completely happy. "I needed to bring a friend with me."

"Maybe you should have brought Ryo, then, and not just his coat." He took her to the low table in the small main room, one corner sectioned off into the kitchen. He dropped her by the table, her hands on his arm pulling him down with her. She leaned forward, and he was startled by the purposeful sensuality of her chest pressed against his side as she slid under his arm, resting her arm across his lap. The dress was cut low in front, clinging to the curve of her breasts.

She said, "I didn't want to bring anyone. It would have been silly. I could certainly handle it myself."

"... as long as you had the safety coat."

"Mm," she said. "Thank you for being awake."

He grinned at her. "It had nothing to do with you at all. I never sleep."

She laughed. "You're lying. I asked you to wait up."

It was a beautiful night with a full moon outside his window and dark trees rising over a park across the street, but the harsh brightness of the overhead lights overpowered the moonlight. Rowen brushed Mia's hair from her face and thought about getting up to turn them off.

Mia decided it for him, suddenly pulling away and staggering to her feet. "Shouldn't've let you..." she muttered.

He put a hand on her thigh above her knee, steadying her at the hem of her dress. He felt the run in her stockings under his fingers and her soft skin underneath. "What?" he asked.

"...buy me a drink... drinks." She leaned forward and he had to catch her shoulders, smelling cheap beer on her breath and the smoke of the bar in her hair along with her sweat. "I was already drunk," she confessed somberly.

"I noticed that. Just a little bit," he whispered back with affected solemnity. She broke into a smile, white teeth against the red color on her lips. She put her hands on his forearms and pushed herself straight.

"Where's your bathroom?"

"There are only three doors: a broom closet, a bed, and a bathroom. I think you should guess." He stood up himself, arms out a little, ready to catch her when she tumbled. She chose the wrong door, almost falling into his bedroom and laughing when he pretended he wasn't going to let her back out again. He felt an absurd little thrill, like it meant something for her to have picked the door she did.

Then he said it aloud because if he didn't make it a joke, he might mean it. "You've told your fortune now," he teased.

She reached up and threw her arms around his neck, the worn corduroy of Ryo's coat against his skin. It was disorienting, smelling Ryo and seeing Mia as they stood there before his bed. He suddenly felt he was being seduced and stepped from the doorway, setting her free though he'd been the one to feel trapped. She vanished into the bathroom, and he was desperately glad he wasn't nearly as drunk as she.

When she left the bathroom, he was sitting at the table staring at his hands. "You can turn off the lights if you want to," he said.

She came over to put her hands on his shoulders from behind. He lifted his chin, looking up at her, his head against her stomach. "Oh, Rowen," she said, "suddenly you look so sad."

"Mia, do you really look at us like... kids? The kids we were?"

She didn't answer immediately. Her purse was sitting by the table on the floor, a plum bag of middle size. Bending down, she pulled it onto the table, her arm reaching past his head, gracelessly tipping the contents onto the wood. She bent her knees and sat beside him, an arm around his waist and her body against his. With her other hand she lifted the small wooden picture frame from the pile of lipstick and spare change and a tampon Rowen carefully ignored.

"My party favor," she said. "Here."

"What do you mean 'here'?" He took it carefully. It was simple and rectangular, all of one color wood.

He felt her breath against his ear as she kissed him lightly on the jaw. "I can't think of you as kids. I didn't do it even then. I'm not that old."

"You might have," Rowen suggested, "if Ryo hadn't been there."

"Was he so mature? I don't remember." She was teasing.

"No." Rowen flipped the picture frame over, prying at the back with his fingernails. "But I don't think you wanted to sleep with any of the rest of us."

He looked up when Mia put her face against his shoulder, snickering into his coat. Her voice was muffled when she spoke. "I knew you were going to do that. You pull everything apart."

Rowen's fingers froze with the back of the frame half-open. "I can fix it."

She patted the back of his hand. "No, no. It's okay. Now we have to find a picture to put in it."

He cast his eyes around the apartment, settling finally on the little chest of drawers beside the bathroom door. "I think..." He stood, going to the wardrobe and opening the last drawer. Mia put her elbows on the table, watching him.

When he returned, he was carrying a sheaf of photographs coated in a shallow layer of dust. He laid them in front of her and sat across from her at the table, waiting. She opened the folder, startled at the young faces she saw. "I remember these."

"I don't," Rowen admitted. "I found them a little while ago."

"Have you looked at them?" She was shuffling through the pile quickly, as though she knew exactly what she was looking for.

"No... not much. I'm not really big on pictures."

"I gave these to you years ago. I – " Abruptly, she burst into giggles and pulled a picture from the stack. She held it against her chest, shaking with laughter that was indecently loud. Rowen was reminded that neither of them was sober.

"Can I see the picture?" he asked. Mia shook her head. She smiled at him, her cheeks flushed. He'd left the picture frame when he'd gone to the wardrobe, and she picked it up now, pulling at the back. She was too excited or too drunk to manage the cardboard and plywood backs, much less the latches that held them there, so she thrust them at Rowen, the photograph on top, trusting in his lesser inebriation to solve the problem.

Rowen took them both and stared.

"Can't you figure it out?" Mia asked urgently. There were tears at the edges of her eyes from the laughter. She sniffed, rubbing absently at her nose with the back of her hand.

He looked up at her, his eyes gone very round, holding the photograph like cracked glass.

"Oh," Mia said. "Oh, dear. I'd forgotten you hadn't noticed when I'd taken that."

Rowen gaped at her. "It looks like I'm kissing him!"

"Well, you were about to."

"No, I wasn't!"

Mia lurched forward to bat at his wrist reassuringly. "But it's such a cute picture."

"I... well," Rowen looked at the photograph in his hand, at the dark boy leaning against Mia's house in the springtime and the back of the skinny boy who leaned over him, sunlight highlighting his blue hair. He remembered talking to Ryo there, admitted to himself that maybe he'd gotten close enough to give me Mia a reason to take the picture. But he looked at home there, with his face next to Ryo's, and Ryo's eyes were bright. "I guess it is."

"And look," Mia gushed. "He's wearing my coat!" She tapped the glossy finish over Ryo's face.

"It's his coat," Rowen reminded her. Mia put her hand over the corduroy on her arm and looked very drunk. "Your coat now, I guess."

"Open the picture frame, Rowen. Please?" Mia leaned across the table, baring the soft rise of her breasts. Rowen dropped his eyes to the picture frame in his hand.

"Alright," he said. He put the separate pieces on the carpet carefully, slipping the photo into place as Mia sank heavily to the floor beside him. He closed the latches and flipped the frame over. "Here you go," he said, handing it to her.

"Oh, no," she said earnestly. "It's for you."

He stared at her, horrified. "I'm not putting this in my apartment!"

"Of course you are," she said reasonably. Seeing the expression on his face, she made an angry, disappointed sound. "Oh, fine. We'll put it someplace people can't see it."

"Like the closet?"

"Your sarcasm does not amuse me," she declared, and through great effort, stood without his help. "The closet it is!"

She snatched the frame from his hand before he quite understood that he should have kept it from her. Warily, he followed her to the bedroom, watched her throw open his closet doors.

"Here. Behind the shirts." She pushed apart the dress shirts and slacks on their hangers, pressing the frame against the uncovered wall. With her head cocked in careful consideration, she glanced back at him, waiting for a response.

"I... I guess, that looks lovely," he fumbled as if she'd asked him to evaluate a work of art or perhaps a clothing ensemble.

She sighed, lowering her hands. The room was a small one, barely bigger than the futon he slept on, which he'd left on the floor. He sat on it now, watching her as she came towards him. She said softly, without hope, "If you're really going to do it, we'll need a hammer and a nail."

Her energy seemed to have dissipated. She sat beside him, her knees bent boyishly and her arms resting between her legs, still holding the picture frame.

"I could just leave it in the drawer," he said. "Nobody would see it there either." Mia turned her face to him, smiling wryly.

"But then you'd forget about it. I don't want you to forget it again."

"Maybe. I don't have any nails."

"No, of course not. Why would you?" She looked desolate, her disheveled hair and sweat no longer looking glamorous but undone. Rowen put his arm around her and she leaned into him, rested her cheek on his collarbone. He let himself fall back onto the futon and Mia went with, lying next to him on her side, the photograph between them in her hand.

"I... I'll borrow one tomorrow," he promised. "And a hammer."

She peered up at him, blinking away the lingering tears. "Really?" she asked. Her empty hand was resting on his chest.

He breathed deeply, for a moment uncertain, staring at the framed photograph between her fingers where it pressed against his hip. "Really."

Mia smiled, turning her face into his shirt. "...s'why I love you..." she mumbled.

Rowen had nothing to say, and after sometime, he realized she'd fallen asleep. He looked through the open door into the main room, regretting that he hadn't turned off the lights like he'd meant too. Mia would wake if he stood to open the door, so he turned his head, closing his eyes and reveling in the feel of her hair against his chin. Tomorrow he'd make Mia her little shrine inside his closet, and maybe she'd come join him in their silly, secret worship of a warrior of fire.


	2. lunch

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

Summary: In the absence of supervillains, Rowen finds other ways to complicate his life.

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**Persuasion – chapter one**

**----**

Mia never told anyone about the picture she'd put on Rowen's wall. It stayed behind the dress shirts he wore to work, small and unnoticeable except for being a dark spot against the white wall. He began taking his shirts from the right and hanging the newly laundered at the left. In this way, he created a simple assembly line of fashion and nearly forgot about the frame behind the cloth.

Months passed. A year. He met a crazy girl. He almost married her. Stuff... happened.

And the phone rang.

"Hello?" He ripped it off the hook, one hand plunged into the cabinet in search of the last clean glass. The sound of the old dishwasher was almost enough to hide Kento's voice on the other line. "Oh, hi," and then to his surprise he laughed. "No, I haven't forgotten you."

----

Kento said, not for the first time, "He seemed fine on the phone."

His companion, a slender man with strong arms and soft hair, frowned at the table's empty seats and didn't answer, lost in conjecture and hypotheses.

"He said he might be late," Kento said, again not for the first time. "He's been busy, he said."

"I've heard," said the man with a sailor's powerful forearms and nothing else, because a familiar man had just stepped into the restaurant, hesitating at the edge of the crowd. His hair was short and had been blue so long that his friends were no longer certain it wasn't natural. Under the blueberry hair stood a narrow man, thin and long-limbed, shading his eyes unnecessarily to peer over the packed tables.

Kento waved. Rowen wove carefully between the tables and chairs towards them. "Hi," he said, with a self-conscious smile and slid into the chair at Kento's left.

The third man, whose name was Cye, smiled back at him. Sun and waves showed in his face, the mark of an ambitionless man tied to the sea. Now he lived more than an hour from the ocean and it showed sometimes, in a melancholy twist of his face.

It might have been worth it, to be closer to friends, but two months ago, Rowen had turned away from a girl he claimed he loved to retreat into an empty apartment and close the door. No one had seen much of him since. Admittedly, no one had been seeing much of him before that either.

Rowen tugged off his coat, settling it over his chair. He moved more quickly and more violently than was necessary, as though hoping to appear purposeful; he looked merely pretentious. He did not see Cye staring at the street outside because he also was trying to look anywhere else but at the friends who'd invited him here.

"I'm sorry I was late," he said finally, studying a woman's shoes crossed beneath her chair. "I guess I was surprised by the invitation."

"Cye felt neglected," Kento said. Rowen's head jerked back to center and Kento added, "At least, I think he did. He also felt _vague _and _obscure_, so I didn't quite get the whole story."

The sailor glared at Kento just as Rowen said, hastily, "I've been busy." Cye's eyes had shifted from blue-gray to dull green, like they did sometimes. It was something Kento hadn't ever noticed until Rowen had pointed it out one day in summer, sitting on Mia's porch waiting for their friends to come home.

Rowen flipped through the menu, absently, his face suddenly less animated than it had been. Kento wanted to tell Cye to get his act together before Rowen suspected an ulterior motive. The casual public lunch (or perhaps better termed interrogation) had been his idea after all.

"Alright," Cye said. Then he put his chin in his hand and gazed out the window. There was nothing absent-minded about it. He said simply, "Ryo's decided to go." He glanced back. "To Africa, I mean. Keisuke isn't going with him."

The table went quiet at the name. No sound but Cye's nails tapping against the menu cover with deliberate casualness. Kento had a moment of inner fury. He really should have known.

For a long time now, Kento had thought of Rowen and Ryo as a sort of unfortunate Siamese twins. Completely alien in mindset but doomed to orbit each other endlessly, bound by some unpleasant yet vital organ. It went like clockwork. Ryo leapt into a horde of demons out for his blood without bothering to plan - Rowen screamed bloody murder. Rowen consumed an entire dinner conversation discussing the meditative qualities of musty library smells – Ryo left in the middle to play video games about ninjas.

But when looking for Ryo, one went to Rowen and vice versa. It was a kind of unholy chemistry that made life interesting.

Mia understood. She flirted with both of them like they were one body. Sage and Kento did their best to go with the flow. Only Cye seemed able to separate the two and conduct his friendships in isolation.

Until Keisuke. On that day, Ryo had walked through that strange, siamese bond as if he'd never known it was there. Like the spider webs that crisscrossed the sidewalk on summer mornings. To meet an ordinary man with broad shoulders and straight teeth, who wasn't Rowen.

Kento lifted his hand to call their server. Better they order. Better to eat than talk about someone Rowen hated for no better reason that that he'd stepped into the middle of something that Rowen held sacred. Something obscure, with smudged edges and an indistinct boundary.

The menu hit the tablecloth with the sharp crack of plastic on plastic. "Fuck," Rowen said and passed a hand through his bright hair. The chair screeched back from the table.

"Rowen – " Cye started, but Rowen was already standing, making a sharp gesture with his hand.

"Never mind. I'm just going to bathroom. Is that okay?"

"But – "

Kento patted his shoulder. "Leave it be. He's gone." Cye watched Rowen disappearing into the back of the restaurant. There was no expression on his face. His hair was bleached out by the white lights, barely even red.

The waitress reached their table, lifting her blue pen and pad. She pulled the cap off with her teeth, snapped it onto the end of the pen. Ready to take their order.

"I didn't chase him off," Cye said quietly, ignoring her, "I didn't say anything. You heard."

This was extremely inaccurate.

"I know, Cye," Kento promised him, smiling at the girl. She stared blankly back. Her face and Cye's – so much the same, but one of them cared.

Kento ordered for them all, glancing wildly at the menu. It was easier to worry about food.

"Keisuke really isn't that bad," Cye was saying. "I've spent time with him."

The waitress gave him a speculative look, gathering up Rowen's forgotten menu. She left Cye with his, like he were dangerous and might bite if she got close. "Ryo seems to like him," added Cye, oblivious.

Kento wondered if there was something about not growing up in a restaurant owned by one's parents that rendered wait staff invisible. Alien. Handing over his menu, he favored Cye with the same strained expression the waitress had worn moments before. "Yeah, well. A guy ought to like his own boyfriend."

"Yes, exactly."

The matter should have been settled. Rowen rarely ever talked about Keisuke anymore. Rowen was out of school and employed. Rowen was on the up and up and, until a month ago, had been in love. Then Cye came at him with words designed to sink hooks into forgotten places and Rowen stalked off to pout in the bathroom.

This shouldn't have surprised Kento. Rowen and Cye fought like teenaged girls. Always had. Always would.

Rowen reappeared, dreary faced. When he saw Kento watching, he mumbled, "Forget about it" and Kento said something about the weather. Cye, who's indifferent expression had been sloughing away like a sand castle under a rising tide, looked heartbroken.

Their food came. Cye rushed out in the middle to attend his class (he'd gone back to school again, though he probably wouldn't have the focus to finish another degree). Rowen poked curiously at the squid on his plate that had arrived without any suckers and tentacles to play with. Then, for no reason at all, he looked up, towards the entrance.

Cye had turned back at the door. He spoke across the din, silently, but his lips said, "_This isn't finished_." As though, once past a certain radius, heartbreak vanished and courage returned. He whirled, fled.

Rowen stared after him with a little frown, ignorant of the promise of interrogation hidden in Cye's parting threat. Cye was certain there was some clearly defined motive behind the shattering of Rowen's engagement. He believed it could be Discovered with Means and Determination like the villains on Scooby Doo.

Watching this in silence while he chewed thoughtfully on Cye's meal, Kento wondered if they had ever considered keeping score.

----

The phone was ringing when Kento returned to his room. It was the same room he'd lived in all his life. He'd only left it once, a few years ago, to attend a small culinary school next door to the university where Cye had earned his first undergraduate degree.

Cye was back at school now, though Kento's expectations weren't high. All of Cye's attempts to earn a higher degree inevitably fell prey to a yearning for the sea. He had tried once to unite the two; after all, what better man to study all things marine? But something about the water turned him too philosophical, draining him of all ambition. He had lost interest in the answers the faculty wanted to find.

Kento roused himself from memory, poised in the open door. There was a teenager on his bed, flipping through the channels on the TV. She ignored the insistent rings of the telephone, remote in hand. She was his youngest sister. Of them all, the best target of brotherly teasing. His favorite and she knew it.

"Hey. Brat. Answer the phone." She glanced up at him, making a face.

"It's your phone." Kento thought of Rowen, whom she aspired to be like in everyway. When she succeeded, it sent chills up his spine like the memory of a treasured horror movie.

To shake the feeling, he lifted a hand as if to smack her, but she knew better. The phone rang again, anxiously. He threw himself across the bed to answer it. "Hello?"

His sister fell backwards, her head landing by his elbow. "Who is it?" she whispered, cupping a hand to her mouth secretively.

"What is it? You forget something?" Kento covered the receiver with his hand, whispering back, "Cye."

Her face flattened out, bored, and she rolled away, picking up the remote where she'd dropped it.

Kento kept talking. "Yeah, I guess he was weird. But Rowen's always been a little neurotic." The bed bounced. His sister was back, blinking up at him with her dark eyes.

"Rowen?" she asked. Kento laughed.

"I dunno, Cye. I've got nothing to tell you, but you're welcome to discuss it with my sister's hormones for as long as you like." He poked at her nose. She huffed and kicked off the bed. Kento listened to the door slam and smiled.

Cye rambled on. Kento asked, his sister's silly Rowen imitations echoing in his brain, "Have you tried _asking_ him if he's going crazy?"

It was a reasonable question, despite its sarcasm. It was what Rowen would have said. If Rowen weren't going crazy.

Cye growled through the phone. And that was the end of that.


	3. picture frame revisted

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

----

**Persuasion – chapter two**

----

Rowen was thinking of nothing when the doorbell buzzed, and the sound startled him. It was year since the picture frame. A month or so since Cye's aborted lunch. He straightened, steadying the tower of cardboard boxes that held his cds and a sound system his mother had bought for him when he left for college. He hadn't had the heart to tell her he didn't listen to music much.

The apartment around him was scattered, lived in. It should have been packed days ago. Lethargically, he wandered to the wall, hitting the button to unlock the entrance. After a few minutes, Kento's broad frame appeared in the open door, staring at the messy apartment skeptically.

"Brought the van," he said.

Rowen mumbled something like an acceptance. He was sitting on the floor, pulling comic books off a shelf. Kento shrugged, stepping into the tiled corner of the apartment that served as the kitchen. "You haven't really packed much, have you?"

"I slept in," said Rowen.

"You _just_ started today?" The fridge door paused in its swing, Kento's head appearing above it.

Rowen mumbled again, picking up a stack of American comics he'd bought from a store in the U.S. during the academic year he'd spent there as part of college. He missed the milk and the comic books. Into the box they went. He started reaching for the thirty eight volumes of Ranma in a neat row.

Kento considered the skinny man with the silly hair very carefully and then asked an incendiary question. He'd been spending too much time with Cye, really.

He said, "When is Sage coming?"

Rowen tilted his head to the side, spinning a roll of packing tape in its plastic case absently. "Sage?" he asked, his back to Kento. His voice was higher than it should have been. He was not usually so obvious when he faked innocence.

Kento grimaced, pulling a glass (also not packed) from the cupboard. It suddenly seemed a very long time since high school.

"I didn't want to call Sage," Rowen said suddenly, in his normal voice.

Kento looked up. "What?"

The comic box was half full. Neatly arranged, meticulously organized. Rowen dropped his head over it, his hands buried in tankobans. Kento watched the sharp line of his shoulder blades underneath the red shirt. It wasn't a good shade on him; too bright, it blasted the color from his skin. With his blueberry hair above it, he had the color scheme of a Fischer Price product.

Rowen spoke negligently, with a shrug, "I... kind of thought he would think I was an idiot."

"Rowen," said Kento, waving his hand at the unpacked apartment, "you _are_ an idiot."

Rowen glared suddenly at the door. He shouted rudely, "Go away!"

Kento froze in wiping his milk moustache on his sleeve, hopelessly confused by this last statement.

But there was Cye in the doorway, glancing curiously around the apartment, at the mess and the empty boxes. Rowen had obviously known Cye was there before there was any way he could have.

Suddenly energized, Rowen slammed a book into the box on top of the others, shiny cover to shiny cover. The sound was a gun shot that hit Kento at the base of his skull. Rowen jerked the cardboard flaps into place, dropping a calf over the top to hold them while he peeled off the packing tape inch by careful inch with a certain vicious intent.

"I see we're prepared," said Cye with his eyes on the unpacked apartment. But he said it without conviction as though he were only saying it to make noise.

Rowen told Cye, "I've decided to kill you slowly." He eyed the packing tape unrolling in little jerks as though it were the source of all inspiration.

"I was invited," Cye said mildly.

"Not by me."

"Well, seeing as you're so _on the ball_ with the moving thing – " another calm glance over Rowen's clutter, "I can understand why you wouldn't want the extra help."

"Slowly," Rowen elaborated. "_Very slowly."_

Cye shrugged his shoulders underneath his coat before noticing Kento looking so pale on the beige kitchen tile.

"When did you get here?" Kento demanded.

"I followed someone in," Cye explained, misunderstanding his confusion.

"That's not it," Kento started, but Rowen ignored him, crooking a finger at the slender man in the doorway, lips spread wide and thin. Cye only smiled.

"C'mere, Cye," Rowen coaxed, almost leering. His other hand fingered the packing tape dangerously.

Cye cocked his head curiously, his hands in the pockets of his khakis. His neck was smooth and tan. "Oh? What for?"

"I'm going to tie you to the bed I don't have." The other man showed his teeth, and Cye snorted, biting his lip to keep from laughing when so scrawny a person was making a face like a stray dog.

"And do what?"

"Oh, I'll think of something. It's a fantasy thing, see. Imaginary bed, imaginary torture. The details aren't so important."

"If _I_ had someone tied to _my_ bed..." Cye laughed, ducking his head. He kept his hands casually in his pockets like he weren't graceful and strong under his boring, brown clothing.

Rowen was watching with interest under half-closed eyelids. "You'd do what?" he mimicked. Kento closed the refrigerator door and carefully looked the other way.

"I'd think of something," Cye said, an odd light in his eyes. He came into the apartment, sauntering in his cheap slacks to stand over the man in the primary colors of a children's toy sitting on the floor.

Kento set the glass down hard. "Do you know how many times I've had to explain to people that you two aren't flirting?" he asked, rubbing a hand over his face.

Rowen stood slowly, like an old man whose joints gave him trouble, and turned away like he'd forgotten Cye was there (a carefully practiced expression). He wandered across the room to put Kento's milk back into the boxy, white refrigerator. "It would help," he said airily, "if Cye didn't giggle."

"I'm not giggling," Cye called helpfully as he crouched down to inspect the literary collection Rowen hadn't packed. But he was, of course, though hiding it with a hand over his mouth.

It was a small kitchen, trapped between the cabinets and a counter that jutted from the wall. Rowen fiddled with the contents of the refrigerator, and Kento changed the subject with a snap of his fingers. Rowen's face tilted up to look at him, his hand on bottle of sugared juice drink.

"How did you know Cye was here? You just shouted and there he was."

Rowen's face dropped back to the fridge. "Didn't you tell me he was coming?"

Kento frowned but Rowen wasn't looking at him, so he said, shortly, "Wasn't what I meant."

Cye was flipping through Rowen's shelf, pulling out volumes and stacking them next to flat boxes that needed to be folded into their three dimensional shapes. Rowen stood, tossing an arm nonchalantly over the still open refrigerator door.

"Yeah," he said after a moment. "Of course I knew he was coming. Why didn't you?"

Cye looked up. He turned his head, eyes gone hard like he was listening to something normal people couldn't hear. Or see. Or didn't believe in unless they were locked up somewhere with comfortable walls. Kento remembered that look from fighting bad guys. Evil, demonic bad guys from another dimension.

He turned to Rowen and said, "You've got your orb on you?"

Rowen shifted his bare feet on the yellowish tile, asking warily, "Don't you?"

Kento looked to Cye uncertainly. "I don't," Torrent said.

The air before the fridge was chilly. Kento pushed Rowen gently out of the way, shutting the door and giving his shoulder a friendly pat. "Don't worry. You're not paranoid or anything. I just... stopped carrying mine. No problem."

Cye did not make the effort Kento had to smooth things over, staring openly, one eyebrow higher than the other.

----

In the end, it took four hours to get the apartment boxed. Rowen wasn't a materialist, except for the books, and he'd thankfully revealed that his clothes were already packed. Cye didn't mention that it looked like Rowen had been living out of the same suitcase he'd used for his last holiday at Mia's house. Which had been months ago.

Cye watched Kento heft a box to his shoulder, taking another under his arm without even a grunt for his effort, and reflected that Rowen was not the only one to cling to the effects of the mystical armors they weren't supposed to need anymore. Maybe it didn't mean anything. He followed Kento out with his own box, pushing the elevator button that Kento couldn't reach with his hands full. Rowen stayed behind, packing up the straggling items, emptying the fridge.

"Eh?" Kento said. Cye blinked, glancing over his shoulder at the big man behind him.

"What?"

"You looked angry all of a sudden." Cye leaned to the side, looking past Kento's boxes to his own foggy reflection in the elevator's polished metal walls.

"No, not angry," he said, studying his face in the makeshift mirror. "Determined perhaps."

When the last round of boxes was in the van with the futon and the small table, Kento put a hand on Cye's arm, whispering, "Why don't you hang around?" He nodded to the back of the van where Rowen was tossing the last of his things onto the load before shutting the doors. "Just tell me about it later, okay?"

"I will," promised Cye, tracing an X across his chest.

Kento got in the van. The back was not over-packed, and the doors closed easily enough. The keys to the new apartment were sitting in the cup holder; one trip had already been made. Cye discreetly blocked Rowen when he started towards the passenger door, asking politely, "Is there anything else to do here?"

"I guess not," Rowen allowed, frowning suspiciously as Kento started the van. "Aren't I going with him?"

"Posh," Cye said breezily. "You went on the last trip. You do have to turn in the keys or unplug the fridge or something, don't you?"

Rowen watched the car drive away over Cye's shoulder, uncomfortably. "Okay..."

Upstairs, Cye pushed open doors and peered into corners, promising Rowen that such final searches were necessary. Rowen sat in the middle of the carpet, spinning the key ring around his fingers, saying nothing even when Cye came out of the bedroom holding a small picture frame in his hand.

"You left this on the wall," Cye explained. He sounded quieter than usual. Rowen frowned.

"What is it? I don't remember anything like that."

"It was in the closet. Why did you hang anything on the closet wall?" Cye handed the small cherry frame to his friend sitting with his legs crossed on the floor. Rowen took it, watching Cye rub his hands on his slacks nervously, and flipped the picture frame over.

"Oh."

"I've never seen that picture before," Cye said cautiously. Rowen stood up, draping his coat over his hand to conceal the picture from sight.

"Mia put it there," he muttered, "after her high school reunion." He heard suddenly laughter, high and far from sober. Mia's knees at the edge of the futon were apart like a boy's, showing the run in her stockings. He felt her disgust at the girl she remembered being and the empty frame pressed into his hands, needing to be filled with any picture, as long as it wasn't of her.

He let out a long breath as a strong man might before lifting a heavy load. "Let's turn in the keys, okay?"

Cye muttered something irritable under his breath like a curse. When he closed the door as they left, it slammed.

"I never really liked this restaurant," Rowen said, later, when the waiter had cleared their dishes and he could find nothing better to do than roast pieces of bread over the candle flame.

"Sorry," Cye said, offended.

Rowen looked up, his eyes confused. The table was small, in the back of a nearly empty room. Rowen's coat was bundled up on the window sill, presumably still hiding Rowen's latest mystery, which, like Rowen's other mysteries, would not have been nearly so interesting if Rowen knew how to give an explanation that wasn't vague or unsettling.

"I just meant... I was thinking about a girl I brought here when I didn't have any money. We shared something she picked out. Salmon, I think. I don't like salmon."

Cye said, with conviction, "Nerdy stereotypes are realized in you."

The candle fizzled out, suffocated by garlic bread and butter. "I thought nerds were supposed to be rich when they grew up," Rowen murmured, poking at the char with a spoon. Cye was half-waiting for a member of the staff to force the check on them as a less than subtle goodbye. He considered saying something about Rowen's bad habits.

He said instead, "I meant socially inept."

"Oh," Rowen said. "Oh, right."

"Will you tell me about the picture now?" Cye asked, staring at the dark wool piled by the window. People walked by on the street, animated but eerily silent behind the glass.

"No. Do you only pick my brain at restaurants or can we do take out next time?" Cye looked away from the window to see Rowen's expression twitch, and Cye realized he was trying not to smile. The restaurant was dim, but it was still beautiful outside, the end of bright, crisp day that made Cye want to drive until he got hit water, regardless of previous plans or the fact that it was becoming cold enough to justify Rowen's winter coat.

"Ass," Cye accused.

"I really think you bring out the best in me, Cye," Rowen replied. "I just want you to know that."

"Alright," Cye said, unimpressed, "then tell me about Sage."

Rowen started. "Sage?" he repeated, honestly surprised.

"You seemed to be in the know."

"You've got to be kidding me – "

"Picture, then!" Cye agreed, reaching for the coat triumphantly, laughing a little to cover his unease when Rowen snatched it away hastily, the wooden frame slipping from its hiding place and clattering against the floor, shockingly loud in the deserted room. By the door, the maitre d turned from his podium, peering curiously into their corner.

Rowen ducked his head, glaring murderously across the table while he bent to pick up the frame. Cye tried to look abashed and didn't find it hard.

"It's nothing," Rowen muttered quickly. "I don't see him much any more. Is it weird that we're not as close? So what?" Cye was startled to realize that Rowen was talking about Sage. Cye found he'd lost interest. The picture wasn't even of Mia, why had she put it there?

"What?"

"Sage," Rowen said unnecessarily. "I'll talk about Sage, ok?"

"Alright," Cye agreed uncertainly. "Do you want to do it here?"

Rowen wrapped his hands around his coat, picture hidden again in its dubiously safe place. "Yes."

"Ok."

Rowen stared at him. Cye said nothing. "Cye," Rowen prompted. "You have to ask me something so I can answer it."

The picture, Cye thought and said, "Why do you think Sage's love life is doomed?"

Rowen sighed, sounding too relieved for Cye's piece of mind. "I don't think it's doomed."

"Yes, you do. You always do. Every time."

"It's not that. I just don't think he needs anybody else. He has _transcended_ self-esteem. I don't know why he keeps trying." Rowen made a face and corrected himself, "Well, okay, maybe there's sex."

Cye said nothing, thinking of the rational planes of Sage's face.

"Girlfriend's want to feel needed, Cye," Rowen went on. "He doesn't need one. He's zen."

"And you're not. Zen."

"I'm sane. Sane people hate themselves at least a little bit. I think it's the long centuries of religious indoctrination."

Hanging bells jangled in the background as new customers entered the restaurant. Cye could hear the host talking politely and leading them to a table. The waiter appeared at Cye's shoulder, slipping the check onto the table by his water glass. Cye stared at it for a long time before he looked up. "Rowen," he said honestly, "you sound jealous."

"I'm not..." Rowen trailed off. "At the very least, you realize that's not the kind of thing you can say and have anybody admit to it. Are you jealous? Who says yes to that?"

"Sage is just crazy."

"Bonkers," Rowen agreed, with his arms wrapped around a coat wrapped around a ridiculous picture that he wouldn't explain.

"You shouldn't try handling these things on your own," Cye told him, putting a silver credit card at the edge of the table with the bill. The waiter took it quickly, whispering thanks while Rowen paid no attention, narrowing his eyes at the man across from him.

"What things?" he said.

"There was that girl I never met," Cye reminded him. "And something about a wedding?"

"Cye," Rowen warned.

"And now you're moping because Sage _isn't_?"

"Cye..."

"Alright, come with me." Cye scribbled a tip on the paper the waiter had returned to him, standing and slipping his wallet into the back pocket of his pants.

"CYE," Rowen said and didn't stand up.

The other blinked at him, paused with his hand on his pocket. "Yes?" he asked as if he were confused (which he wasn't).

"Please," Rowen said. "Stop therapizing me. At least vocally, where I can hear you."

"I'm not. I'm telling you that you're spending the night with me." Cye took his arm, pulling Rowen from his seat. Rowen kept his arms around the coat, wadded up against his chest, glaring dangerously but looking like nothing more than a pouting child with his safety blanket.

"That's a little forward," he observed. "Is this about what I said earlier? About tying someone to the bed? Because I can take it back."

"I don't mean it like that, imbecile. I have a couch."

"What about my apartment? Why am I not sleeping at my apartment?"

"Because I'm leaping to my own conclusions about your mental heath. Let's go!"

Rowen trailed behind him as they left the restaurant and walked towards the bus stop. Cye busied himself zipping up his jacket, not certain how Rowen would respond. There was something... off. And he would not let Rowen out of his sight until he knew all the things he wanted to know.

The street smelled of heavy traffic, of exhaust and gasoline. Cye stepped on a discarded newspaper and risked a glance over his shoulder. Rowen was following him, albeit reluctantly, as though he were looking at the merchandise in the windows, but Cye didn't believe he had much interest in the women's clothing store or the art gallery that followed.

"I don't like that answer," Rowen mumbled finally.

"Alright," Cye said kindly. "Then it _is _about tying someone to the bed. I want to have my brutal, kinky way with you." A bus pulled up to the stop a dozen yards in front them, whirring loudly as it lowered to the ground and opened its door.

"I'm on to you," Rowen warned, letting go of his bundle with one hand to root through the coat pockets for a city bus pass. "Watch out, I see your MIND."

"Telepathy now, is it?" Cye asked cheerily. "Get in the bus, amateur. We're the second stop."


	4. water games and a kiss

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

----

**Persuasion – chapter three**

----

A long time ago:

There was a pond beneath a waterfall twenty minutes from the house where Mia lived. High school had been over for an eye blink, and they still had time to pretend that higher education wouldn't scatter them past the easy reach of bicycles or the occasional borrowed automobile. The days were still cool and Ryo had stared, a little horrified, at the skinny boy who had thrown open his door to announce the trip to the swimming hole.

The water was colder than the day ever would be, and when Rowen hesitated unexpectedly at dunking the shivering warrior of fire, Mia appeared from nowhere to do it for him. Rowen stared, shocked, while Kento hovered by his shoulder in shared "Whoa, man..." feeling. Cye vanished into the deepest water beneath the falls without bothering to flinch at icy mountain water, and Rowen watched him go, a little wistful for the grace his gawky body did not possess, on land or sea.

Kento pushed off towards the ripples around a laughing college girl and the slender, dark boy in her arms who was blinking water from eyelashes longer than her own. He swept a wave towards them with his thick hand. "Smells fishy," he said, nostrils flaring.

"It does," Sage agreed. He stared up at the falls, and Rowen knew he was impressed because he reached up to push back the pale hair in front of his right eye. Rowen grinned, leaning forward and sweeping his arms back like a bird or a performer in his last bow, breathing deeply and noisily.

"It smells like Cye!" he roared, and felt slick fish's hands close around his knees. The cold water closed over him suddenly, his nose burning with inhaled water.

He surfaced coughing and cursing with Cye growling in his ear like no fish ever could, "I don't smell _fishy_."

Rowen hacked up river water, promising him, "Of course you do," and managed a wet gasp before he went under again. Kento's fingers under his arm pulled him to the air again, holding Cye away with his other arm in an easy grip around his neck. Rowen latched weakly onto a leg like a boulder, bent up to his neck in waist-deep water, laughing in a soft wheeze until Cye slipped free. Rowen kicked back, dodging and reveling in the speed of his long body.

Above them, Lifeguards perched on tall chairs, watching visitors duck under buoys, the depths labeled in white paint on the rocks. Kento supposedly remembered a time when the small river had been without such public concerns for safety, but today there were children and parents and tanning parties on the grass. Rowen came up for air with Cye's arms around his waist, and gaped at the girl entering the water.

"Cye," he breathed, "look."

Cye turned, didn't choke him just yet. "At what?"

"That girl. She has utterly _enormous_ breas..." Cye pushed him under, and his voice became silent bubbles of protest. Sage joined them, crossing the pool in slow, strong strokes of his arms.

"Can he breathe?" he asked mildly of the figure colored green by the water over his face. Cye shrugged, tossing his head to clear the dripping red bangs from his eyes, water beading on his red cheeks. Rowen kicked downwards, escaping Cye's hand into the green waters of the river bottom, and reappearing past Sage, pulling himself up the blonde's leg to freedom.

Grinning, he gasped, "Cye, you virgin."

Water-dark eyebrows lifted minutely, arms treading water slowly. "Are we starting a club?"

"Why?" Sage asked. Rowen's hands slid onto his shoulders, asking Sage to hold him up when there was no ground to hold Sage up himself. Shielded from the threat of a smaller boy with seaweed eyes, Rowen flicked a spray of tiny droplets towards the shore where a young woman in a coral suit flinched from the cold. High, nervous laughter echoed oddly across the water to the boys by the falls.

"That. Is that natural?" Sage's eyes slanted subtly towards Cye.

"Tits," Cye said acidly, and then blushed when Sage's pale face turned to his.

"Sage?" Rowen asked, resting his arms lightly over Sage's collarbone.

"Very astute, Rowen." Water lapped at his shoulders as Sage pushed his arms away, swimming towards the busty girl in the shallows. She lifted her hands to her mouth calling out, "Say-aage...!"

Rowen lunged forward, catching an ankle while ignoring the intolerant look aimed at him from gray eyes. "You have got to be kidding me!"

Sage sighed. "She used to come to the dojo. I'll be back." And then he was gone, Rowen staring after him and slowly sinking. He shut his eyes, fell slowly deeper, cold silence closing over his head.

Cye yanked him above the surface, snorting impatiently out his nose. "What now? Chest envy? There are hormones for that..."

"I just... kind of feel like a jackass." Cye's fingers tightened and loosened on his arm uncomfortably. He glanced back towards the shore.

"They _were _unusually large."

Something brightened in Rowen's face, his lips pulled back in a grin. "Weren't they?" Then he pushed off of Cye's body, tipping the other man beneath the water, diving for Ryo and Mia and Kento, where the big ronin watched their lithe landlord's ongoing seduction attempt with an equal mix of interest and boredom.

----

Evenings were quieter in Mia's big house, the favorite hang out their parents didn't quite understand. Rowen lingered in the hallway, watched Ryo picking fingers through shoe laces, damp towel tossed over his shoulder. Mia smiled behind him, holding her yellow beach bag to her chest. Ryo's eyes flickered up to Rowen's face, pulling at him without meaning to.

There was something familiar at his back, and Rowen turned away from Ryo to follow Sage up the stairs, sliding a hand softly along to wall until his fingers found the light switch. Sage turned, pushing past a plain white door, and Rowen followed. There was the bookshelf they'd pulled from Mia's attic just for him, the one he'd filled so easily and hadn't quite managed to empty again. It'd stay behind probably, disorganized science fiction in a home he would leave to study science fact.

"Kento got a movie," he said, when Sage stopped at the bed.

"I know. It's probably horror."

"Yeah." Rowen pulled a book from the shelf, smiling. "Mia was annoyed last time, but I figure if we let her sit on the couch next to... ahem... _someone_, she won't mind as much."

The bed bent under Rowen's knees, book abandoned momentarily while he piled the pillows against the headboard. He fell back against them, flipping open the book he'd already read to a random page. He lifted his eyes, expecting to share a grin with a friend, but Sage's face was quiet, balking at some secret.

"I don't think Mia is going to have much luck."

"Why not?" Rowen grinned ridiculously. "I bet Ryo's pretty easy."

But Sage didn't smile or add a stupid comment of his own, hidden under habitual courtesy and a guiltless face. Instead he hesitated, touching a hand to the hair over his eye. It was an absent minded gesture, one Rowen was used to, though now it seemed out of place. He didn't understand what Sage had to be embarrassed about in Mia's house. "I don't think Ryo... likes girls very much."

"Uh."

"I don't," Sage explained, "know if it's something I should warn her about."

"Oh."

He watched Rowen impatiently until the archer pulled his expression into something like nonchalance, tried to sound uncaring. "I dunno. Maybe you're right, maybe you're not."

"What should I do?"

"I don't know. What does that mean anyway? 'Not liking girls'?"

Sage sighed. His head tilted slowly, the hair falling away. He watched the ceiling, white, expressionless, blank. "Are you frightened of going away?"

Rowen hesitated, a finger poised lightly in turning the page. The bed smelled like high school and the directionless, philosophical debates of teenagers. "I don't know," he said honestly.

"...I am. I think."

In the soft light of the setting sun, Sage's skin held an unnatural luminosity, trapped in the lines of his face, his hair, and in grey eyes reaching towards the edge of violet. Rowen lost the awareness of the book in his hands somewhere in the middle of indigo.

"I'll come back," he promised impulsively. "There's too much snow up north."

Sage closed his eyes, ducked his head. "Thank you."

----

Music was playing over Mia's sound system, almost hiding the static of the television half-set up for a movie night. People were moving. Cye pushed his way into the kitchen. Sage left. Rowen sat on the stairs and watched Kento dash about, insisting on complete darkness for a night of self-imposed horror.

Then the house around him was empty, a quirk of probability. He stood, finding his way to the room where Mia was curled in a chair beneath a worn afghan. "Why not the couch?" he asked quietly so as not to wake the sleeper.

Her smile was wistful, watching Ryo asleep below Rowen's arms. "I'm not that silly."

His grin was cocky and shameless, slouching with his arms crossed on the back of the couch. "Not that much of a floozy, you mean? Eh?"

"You're a brat, Rowen Hashiba."

"What's wrong? You're not our _mom_."

"Sometimes I feel like it." She pulled the afghan tighter, flicking her eyes to the boy on the couch, and Rowen wondered why she was blushing _now_, after showing so little humility in the water.

"Come on," he said, going for a subtle leer, "_I'd _do it."

"Rowen," Mia whispered through her teeth, staring at him desperately. He bent dramatically across the back of the couch, and stopped, startled, by Ryo's open eyes watching him warily.

"Oy," he said. "Maybe not." Then suicidally, he ducked down and put his lips to Ryo's cheek because he'd said he would, feeling the heel of Ryo's palm hitting his chest even as he tasted skin. Mia shrieked and hid the girlish sound behind her hand.

His breath left explosively, leaving a hard sort of pain like a physical lump in his breast. He actually fell forward, over the front of the couch and on top of Ryo who was quickly scrambling upright and reaching for Rowen's shirt. Rowen opened his eyes, blinking at Ryo's face bent over him and lifting him up. He stared into the glare, realizing absently that Ryo hadn't said anything and that he really looked upset.

"Sorry," he managed. Ryo looked lost. Rowen pointed erratically towards the woman on the chair.

"Her," he gasped. "Needed… a demonstration." Ryo stared over his head, dazed. Rowen heard Mia stutter, fall into a sigh.

"Oh, it was..." She tossed her head, exasperated. "Oh, it was a joke, Ryo!" And she really was laughing. Rowen dropped his head against Ryo's stomach, closing his eyes and smiling. There was satisfaction in that smile, from icy water against his skin, from teasing Cye and a promise made to Sage. From Ryo's heat.

He felt hair on his face and opened his eyes to Ryo staring down at him, tired patience in the frown above his eyes and the accepting turn of his lips. Rowen laughed at him. Then he apologized again, knowing he didn't sound sincere, liking it that way. Mia was curled in her chair, lips pressed against her hands against the blanket over her knees, delight behind her smile.

Almost he did it again. He trusted Sage's judgment, after all, and why shouldn't it be him?


	5. rowen gets a new idea

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

----

**Persuasion – chapter four**

**----**

Sunday, the present:

Rowen left his shoes by the door with his coat, absently slipping the picture frame into one large pocket. He didn't think he needed to hide it. Cye had the decency to be blunt and would ask him about it when he wanted to know. But when Rowen drifted into the sitting room where Cye stood awkwardly by a dark armchair, it wasn't the picture Cye asked about.

"Why are you moving?"

The question was weeks late if Cye hoped to change anything by it.

"Why?" Rowen asked.

Cye counted off, finger by finger. "You have a nice apartment, it's big enough for you, you're moving farther away from your friends, and nothing has changed in your job."

"I don't know," Rowen said. "I wanted a change?"

Cye hesitated, pursing his lips. Inexplicably, he seemed to forget the question, and vanished down the hall, reappearing with something in his hands, which he casually tossed towards the couch. Rowen lifted his hands from his thighs and caught the box neatly in front of his face.

"Chocolates." Rowen turned the box over, staring at the swirling French letters across the maroon cover. It was dark outside by now, and the lights in the apartment glinted off the plastic wrap.

"You went to France?" he asked lamely. Cye had turned his head, watching Rowen thoughtfully out of his sea eyes.

"Mia bought it at a mall somewhere," he corrected. "She likes to buy presents."

"Oh," Rowen said, pulling at the plastic wrap. His fingernails were chewed too short to make a hole in the plastic, so he bit at it with his teeth.

"Need any help?"

Rowen shook his head. He opened the chocolate box, staring at the descriptions mirrored on the lid above the small brown and white sweets. Cye took a sheet and a blanket from the closet behind him, leaving them on the couch next to Rowen. "I'll get a pillow," he said.

Rowen watched him disappear through a door in the short hallway off the main room. He assumed it was Cye's bedroom, but Rowen had not been here before to know. He didn't notice Cye hitting him with the pillow until there was something soft against his face.

"Am I supposed to go to sleep?" he asked, tossing the pillow to the edge of the couch with the folded blankets. "It's only eight o'clock."

"Is it?" Cye said breezily. "That's actually more awareness of the world than I expected you to have."

Rowen held up his left wrist absently, biting into a praline in his other hand. "I haff a wotch."

Cye only watched him with eyes that held a sudden depth. When he opened his mouth, it was like the oven door swinging down in the candy house of the hungry witch.

"What?" Rowen asked sharply.

"Did you know that Ryo's coming back on Saturday?"

Rowen hesitated, forgetting to be snappish. "...No."

"He called Mia a few days ago. If you weren't in seclusion, you'd probably already know. Do you want to go the airport to pick him up? He'll be jetlagged, but he'll be glad to see you anyway."

Without really meaning to, Rowen took another chocolate from the box, turning it in his fingers, studying the spiraling white chocolate drizzled over the dark base. "Will Keisuke be there?"

The other man sighed. "Yes."

Rowen tossed the chocolate back. "I'll probably stay home."

"Rowen," Cye started.

"I don't like Keisuke. Tell me when Ryo dumps him, but I'm not going near him before then."

"Do you expect Ryo to be chaste for his entire life? Should we send him to a monastery?"

"This has nothing to do with him. I just don't like Keisuke."

"Oh, bullshit."

"Says who? Did I miss something?"

Cye jabbed a finger at the doorway and Rowen's coat hanging neatly with the picture frame in its pocket. "_That_," he said.

Rowen didn't respond, and slowly, like from a sieve, the anger seeped away, and he bent over his knees, sighing.

"Yeah," he said, "That is a little incriminating."

There was nothing left to say. Rowen sat with the pillow under one hand, watching the chocolates on the table, and Cye retreated silently. Rowen found a book underneath the newspapers on the kitchen counter, reading until he remembered what to do with the blankets at the end of the couch and went to sleep.

----

He dreamed of waking on a bed of stone and knew that he was hiding, deep in a cavern inside the earth. That it was very important that he not be found.

"Rowen, are you okay?" Ryo was leaning over him and his head was in Ryo's lap. This was odd because Rowen remembered this, but their roles were switched. Kayura had tried to possess Ryo's armor, not his. Stupid fairy dust.

Lying there, in Ryo's place, Rowen realized something. As the invalid here, he was free of that cold knot of fear which had plagued him, watching Ryo's uneven breaths, expecting each time that it would be the last. He was struck by the monumental unfairness of it all.

Ryo spoke again. "Rowen, could you get up? There's someone at the door."

Of course, caves didn't have doors, just rocks. But before he could tell Ryo this, something had come in through the open French doors across the room. Mia's doors, from her pretty European house. It was huge and black and shadowed with sinister glowing eyes like a cartoon. It tottered towards them, arms straight out, groaning in a fleshy voice, "Arrrrmorrrrr... Arrrmoorrrr for my massster..." It squished as it stepped like watery cheese.

Rowen burst into hysterical giggles, pointing and shaking. He had never seen anything so funny in his life. Ryo whispered urgently, "Rowen, I can't stop it by myself."

But he only rolled away from Ryo, still laughing uproariously at the mockery of zombie and demon. He stayed that way until the thing reached over and smashed Ryo through a wall.

----

Rowen didn't realize the bedroom door was open until Cye came out of it, blinking away sleep and wondering loudly why the kitchen lights were on at three am. He noticed the dirty pan crusting over on the range with an angry mutter, the egg carton left out, the open refrigerator door. Rowen looked up sheepishly from a plate of burned eggs and didn't explain why.

"Cye," Rowen said, pleading for the familiar face to turn, to glower down at him from eyes that changed like ocean weather. He remembered restless high school afternoons, the silly havoc he could wreak with Kento's help to the sound of Cye's laughter.

"Cye," he repeated, putting his hands to Cye's waist, feeling his friend's back gone stiff with annoyance. He rested his cheek against the wrinkled nightshirt that, as all Cye's things did eventually, smelled faintly briny. There was a moment of hesitation while the irritation drained away. Then slowly, gentle fingers brushed at his hair.

"Bad dream?"

He struggled with speech. His voice sounded soggy and dead, like a monster in a cave. "Zombies," he said. "You know."

The hand on Rowen's hair stilled, sliding down to rest coolly on the nape of his neck. "Actually, I... I expected something more meaningful."

Rowen pulled away, staring up at him. "_Meaningful?"_

Cye grimaced. "Well, I doubt you've been depressed about zombies."

"Dreams don't mean anything, Cye, and I don't _have_ nightmares."

"About zombies?"

It was a tease, but the answer required that Rowen remember the dream itself, pull it back from where he'd layered over it with the taste of bad eggs. He sighed, turning his face into his hand, propped up on the counter. "Maybe occasionally."

The comforting weight was suddenly gone from his side. Rowen dropped his arm to his lap, leaning over the cold breakfast he'd made in the middle of the night. The picture frame made a little clattering sound against the countertop when Cye set it next to his plate.

"It's actually a very silly picture," Cye murmured thoughtfully. "I mean, it surprised me at first, but when you look at it again, it's not actually what it seems to be, is it?"

It wasn't a big frame, simple and of cherry wood. The picture inside showed the side of a house and two boys. The first, with blue hair, leaned over the second, his head dipping like he meant to whisper secrets into the other's dark hair, their faces nearly too close to separate. The camera hadn't seen his face; he was too focused on his companion, who watched him with eyes the color of the other's hair.

It was very much like the moment before a kiss. Which was of course why Rowen had refused to have the thing is his apartment in the first place, and why at the same time, Mia had been so insistent that he should.

"No, it is," Rowen said. He smelled Cye's shampoo without looking up, watching the wood stained like Cye's softly curling hair. "What it seems to be."

He felt Cye's stare, the eyes of a water wizard watching him over a picture of two boys standing too close together. "It is?" Cye asked, surprised, after he'd gone to all that trouble not to leap to conclusions.

Rowen nodded at his younger self, bent in two dimensions over a dark head with bright eyes. "I was going to... Until I remembered I was just worried about him. I didn't..." He flushed vividly, sitting up suddenly like he'd forgotten where he was and who he was talking to.

"Didn't...?" Cye prodded.

Rowen looked away, but his hand closed on Cye's when soft fingers brushed his wrist. "He wasn't going to stop existing just because I wasn't personally involved. Does that sound stupid? OCD?"

"No," Cye said, and Rowen believed him.

----

It was morning. He was half-awake and so made the mistake of answering Cye's phone. Sayoko took it the wrong way, hearing a voice she didn't recognize so early in the day when she'd meant to dial her brother. Rowen choked on air as soon as he realized that the curiosity on the other end of the phone line had entirely too much to do with sex.

"Rowen?" she repeated when he finally introduced himself. "I remember you. Your hair used to match my game boy."

"It probably still does," he said mildly, "unless you got a new one." He stood over the kitchen counter, nervously sliding the pen through his fingers as he pressed it against the countertop. The bathroom door was closed, water running faintly.

She asked suspiciously, "You do have a job don't you? That's not why you've moved in, is it?"

"No. I mean, I do."

Now she laughed self-consciously, "I'm sorry – it was rude, wasn't it? – but I don't know very many offices where people are allowed to dye their hair like that. Cye used to completely go for it though, so maybe you're on to something."

"I've tried dyeing it," he explained, rather than muddle through Cye 'going' for his hair. "It won't dye." He listened to her decide she hadn't heard that (nobody ever believed him), pushing air out through her pursed lips. It was same sound Cye made, when exasperated.

"Anyway," she went on, "tell Cye that mom and I _are _staying home for Christmas this year. Actually, you might think about coming down with him. I know you've done it before, but now that you're... with my brother - I suppose you'll have to meet my mother all over again."

"Now that I'm with–? Oh," he said and put the phone back on the hook without saying goodbye.

The apartment was oddly silent. He realized that the shower had been shut off. Cye opened the door, barefoot in jeans, pulling a shirt over his head. Light from the bathroom window hit the water beading on his neck and back and scattered. Cye had big, muscular shoulders from swimming, though the rest of his build was slight. It was easy to forget unless the other man was half-naked and wet and Rowen had just hung up on the guy's sister because she thought they were sleeping together.

"Rowen?" asked Cye.

"It was nothing," he said. Cye just shrugged and told him where the extra towels were.

He came out of the shower slowly, fully dressed, dropping the sleeping pants he'd borrowed over the back of the couch. Cye had put on a long sleeved blue shirt, his coat folded over a chair at the table while he busily packed a shoulder bag with books. Cye looked up.

"Class?" Rowen asked dumbly.

"Yes," Cye agreed, and left, patting Rowen's shoulder as he went. Rowen stared after him, a little bit confused by the suddenly empty apartment.

"Oh," he said. He found the remote but didn't feel like turning on the TV. Sayoko's voice was rebounding through his head, laughing at what she found there. He thought of Cye's eyes hiding the unexpected power of his armor, and the sudden grace of diving beneath a waterfall. In his mind, Cye stood in the hall, pulling a shirt over bare skin.

Kento said they were flirting. It hadn't occurred to him before. How could it? Ryo took up too much room. Ryo who he couldn't imagine sleeping with, couldn't imagine kissing, but who took up so much room all the same.

He was asleep, in the mostly clean clothes he'd worn the day before, when the apartment door opened. He turned over, gesturing vaguely, expecting to see Cye, but the hair of the woman standing in the doorway was a darker red and her pretty face was not Cye's.

"Mia?" he asked. She jumped, not expecting anyone on the couch. There was a package in her hand.

"Rowen?" she said, dropping her purse into the chair. "Why are you here?"

"Why do you have keys to Cye's apartment?" he countered, feeling mysteriously possessive.

"Friends do that sometimes," Mia said, hanging her coat by his own. "In case someone gets locked out."

"You live way the hell over there." He waved a hand in the wrong direction entirely.

The look she gave him was unsympathetic, her hands on her hips. "No, I'm not sleeping with him."

Rowen flushed. Mia took in his rumpled shirt and the blanket hanging off the couch, and Rowen wondered if she was about to second Sayoko's accusation. "Sorry," he said, standing, hitching up his jeans and looking where she wasn't.

"No, it's alright."

He glanced at her, saying cautiously, "Why _are_ you here?"

She lifted the package. "It's a present for his mother. He left it at my house."

"You know he has class, don't you?"

"He'll be home in an hour or two. I sometimes make a late lunch for him. It's a nice thing to do."

He stared at her.

"Rowen," Mia said, exasperated, stalking past him, "some of us are still friends!"

He caught the wrist she was waving angrily in his face and then the other when she turned, pulling at her so she stopped when her body hit his, hip to hip. Her expression was hard. Hair fell into her face, pulled messily up like it had been a year ago when he'd taken her drinking after her reunion, but her clothing was practical instead of seductive, khaki pants and a green sweater.

"I'm still friends," he said. She touched his hair, shook her head.

"With who?"

He frowned. She turned, going into the kitchen, opening cabinets. He watched, worried somehow when she knew where everything was. She set a bowl down on the granite between the kitchen and the dining room and stopped, startled.

"What?" he asked before he saw the picture on Cye's kitchen counter. "Oh."

"You really did get a nail?"

He remembered that, the day after. He'd borrowed a hammer from a neighbor he barely knew, afraid of asking the favor of someone more familiar, who might ask awkward questions and understand the answers. "Yeah. I did."

Her annoyance had melted into that cherry frame. She touched the 2-D faces, smiling wistfully. "I thought you'd throw it away."

"I did, kind of. I forgot to take it out of the apartment. Cye found it."

"Cye? Oh, Rowen, I hope he didn't give you a heart attack."

"Almost." He pulled himself up on the counter, legs kicking into the dining room but leaning back so Mia's hair was against his shoulder. He grinned at her and suddenly Mia's eyes were teasing him again. "I hid it behind my shirts," he offered.

"Did you?" she asked politely.

He moved his hand across the room to encompass an entire closet of business attire. "I had a whole system all set up. Forgot about it completely."

Mia sighed. He'd said something wrong. Then she was moving away again, tired instead of delighted. Rowen felt a catch at his chest. He had never wanted to steal her energy. He wanted to share it.

"And what good did that do you?" she asked finally. He didn't know how to answer, just stared at her.

"We missed you," she added.

"I didn't _go_ anywhere." She leveled a glare his way she usually reserved for male chauvinists. He spun on his rear, flipping his legs over the bowl she'd pulled from the cupboard. He took a hopping step towards her, catching her up in an embrace that wasn't comfortable so much as restricting.

"I'm dating a TA from International Relations," she said suddenly. It didn't sound like a rebuff.

"Um?" he said, lost.

"It's small talk," she said, sounding a little stupid, putting her head on his shoulder. "Now you tell me what's up with you."

"Why aren't you dating Ryo?"

She laughed into his neck. "I did."

He fumbled. "You did? When?"

"When you all thought it was happening. Those steamy affairs you kept insinuating..." She trailed off. Rowen didn't finish the sentence.

"This is going to sound really stupid," he mumbled, "but...uh... what was it like?"

She was resting her weight against him, his arms around her waist. "Only you," she whispered. He could feel her smile. "Only you would ask me if Ryo was good in bed."

He swallowed. "Well, I'm asking."

"He's gorgeous... just gorgeous." She didn't elaborate, and he shifted, lifting his chin from her hair, staring at the cabinets over the stove.

"What happened?"

She shrugged. "Ryo had a soccer game. There was a man on the side of the field letting the kids play with his lighter, teaching them tricks with cigarettes. He started a shit fit with the parents, and Ryo broke it up. The game rained out. The jerk stuck around, gave Ryo a ride a home."

Rowen snorted. "I really hate that guy." He poked his chin against the top of her head. "Why don't you?"

Mia laughed, slipping her hand up his back, palm resting under his shoulder blades. "I don't know. I just... wasn't jealous." She smiled mischievously. "I still get kisses sometimes."

"From Keisuke?"

"Rowen!" She laughed again, pulling away.

"Where are you going?" He followed out of the kitchen, hesitating when she pushed open the door to the bedroom. "Mia?"

She waved his protests away, not paying attention, a little like she was drunk and falling over his apartment floor. She poked around the shelves with their books and trinkets. "I'm looking for my chocolates."

"Oh. I think I ate those last night." She blinked at him. "Some of them," he amended.

"Cye gave you those?" she asked, a smile tugging at her lips that had little to do with anything Rowen understood.

"Yes," he said warily. There was a crumpled piece of paper on Cye's floor. He bent down to swipe up the trash.

"Never mind," she said. "Maybe I'll tell you later. Rowen? Are you okay?"

He stared at the wrinkled ball that had opened as he picked it up. Cye's quick, skilled handwriting covered it in an inexplicable list.

_Sage_

_Keisuke_

_Ryo_

_The fiancé (whom I never met)_

_generally a neuroti – _it degenerated into scribbles and blacked out, indecipherable items

_He's probably just sexually repressed! Serve him right._

Suddenly the list made a little more sense. Rowen didn't know whether to be flattered or insulted to be the subject of Cye's amateur psychoanalysis. He collapsed onto the bed, laughing absurdly.

"What is that?" Mia half-reached for it, but Rowen snatched it back, shaking his head, unable to form words.

He held the paper between his hands, pressing it to his forehead. "I... I can't believe he wrote 'whom'."

"Are you going to show it to me?"

Rowen shook his head, settling into the bed, laughter subsiding. He said instead, "Cye wants me to meet Ryo at the airport this Saturday."

"Are you going to? Keisuke will be there." Rowen slanted his eyebrows skeptically. Mia rolled her eyes to the ceiling, sitting next to him on the neat bedspread. "You really should give this up."

Rowen grumbled, trying to ignore the fact that they'd spread themselves across Cye's bed like an invading army. "I don't like cocky, rich brats."

"Rowen," Mia said patiently. "I'm a cocky, rich brat."

"You're not cocky."

She kept a smile back, biting her lip, looking too sweet and too young. "You've never seen me in class."

He nodded reluctantly. "You're right. I usually see you trying to get into Ryo's pants."

She hit him, but she was laughing.

"This TA guy, this person who isn't Ryo... if you were going to do that, why him?"

She pushed a strand of hair behind her ear, cocking her head at him, curious to what he was really asking but for once not already knowing. "He's a nice person."

"So am I."

She was kissing him before he'd finished the sentence. Her breath was minty, different from the strawberry smell of her hair. He stiffened, and she pulled back. "You see? You feel taken."

"I can't have Ryo," he said automatically. She stared at him until he flushed red.

"You never used to admit that."

"Yeah, well." He raked a hand through his hair, staring at the table lamp.

Mia patted his knee. "By who then?"

He considered that, remembered a weird phone call from a nosy sister. "I... Maybe no one. Don't ask me."

She waited.

"Don't ask me _yet_," he clarified. She nodded and stood, leaning into his ear as she left.

"You know," she whispered like there was someone who could overhear, "Cye used to really like your hair."

Then she was disappearing through the open door and he couldn't quite manage to get up from Cye's bed. "Hey," he called a little desperately. "Weren't you going to make him lunch?"

"I'll let you do that. Remember to tell him about that package I brought, all right?"

"I..." he fumbled. "Okay. I will. Mia?" She stopped, tapping her fingernails against the door. Even with the window shades down, the green sweater brought out the red in her hair. "What do I make for lunch?"

"I don't know. Cup ramen? You can't possibly do wrong unless you make dolphin-unsafe tuna, and he's not going to have _that_."

Rowen nodded absently. "Right. And Mia?"

"Yes?"

"Thank you."

She smiled. "I love you, Rowen. Have a good time."

----

Cye didn't get back until well after six. Admittedly, Rowen hadn't known when to expect him, but Mia had said one hour, not three and a half. He was uncertain how to bring that up without sounding accusatory. Somehow, he hadn't really been bored left alone by himself.

"Rowen?" Cye was blinking at him. "Why are you still here?"

He froze, hands in his hair, shifting his weight awkwardly. "Uh... what?"

"I didn't think you'd stay. What about your new apartment? Your car?"

"I was waiting..." he explained, sheepishly. Cye was mortified.

"I'm sorry. I'm really sorry. I wouldn't have stayed at the library..."

Rowen put up his hands, trying to stop Cye's apologies. "Um, no, it's okay. It's good you were gone. I'm not really great at making lunch anyway."

Cye looked at him quizzically. "Lunch?"

"Mia was here. She left a package." He gestured vaguely at the table, wandering over to stand nearly shoulder to shoulder. The proximity hummed along his nerves, making him feel he was being weird and blatant.

Cye looked up, but he only tapped the box, explaining, "My mother's Christmas present," like there was nothing odd about Rowen standing right there.

"Oh," Rowen said apologetically, "Your sister called. She said they'd be home for Christmas. Also," he added, "she thought I should come too."

Cye waved a hand at him, paying little attention. It was unclear whether he meant to acknowledge his sister's suggestion or dismiss it. He discarded bag and coat onto the floor in one messy, graceless motion, pushing past Rowen's invasive shoulder into his apartment. "Did she say anything else?"

"No... I hung up on her."

The counter was clear. Rowen had put away what Mia had taken out when he had realized Cye would not be home as predicted. The refrigerator was well-stocked, and Cye looked up from browsing, suddenly focused. "Hung up on her?" he repeated.

Rowen tucked his fingers under his arms, shrugged casually. "She... uh... thought I was here so early because I'd... spent the night."

"You did spend the night," Cye said mildly.

"That's not what I meant." He realized Cye was grinning at him, arching an eyebrow suggestively over leftovers. Cye shut the door, setting a plastic container beside the sink.

"I was..." Rowen cleared his throat, leaning back against the counter. "I was going to do that."

Cye punched open the microwave, entering a time before washing his hands at the sink. "No reason. It's just take-out. Unless you want something better," he added quickly.

"No. S'okay."

"What did you do while I was gone?"

"Sleep mostly." Rowen hesitated.

"What's wrong?"

He shrugged. "I ditched work today. I probably should have told someone."

"Oh, that. I called you in sick before you woke up."

"You _what_?"

Cye mimicked his shrug, but there was a certain smugness in his smile before he turned away, pulling two plates from the cupboard.

"So, Mia was here," Rowen started awkwardly. He was determined suddenly to lay several hitherto unmentionable facts on the table. Cye's shirt sleeves were rolled up to his elbow, wet to the wrist. Water never dried very well on Cye; it just seemed to stick around. Cye reached up, left a damp streak in his red hair that been cut short in back since high school. His bangs were still longish, batting at his eyes, but that was fashion.

Rowen noticed for the first time that it was kind of sexy.

"I know," Cye said, sounding like a response to Rowen's thoughts and nearly stopping Rowen's heart. Legitimately so, since Cye was occasionally psychic.

"Uh, what?"

"I know Mia was here. You mentioned it." He took the container from the microwave, transferring noodles and chicken to the plastic plates, popping a piece into his mouth when it tumbled onto the counter. He didn't have Rowen's bony fingers, his stick thin arms. Rowen's body never seemed to show muscle, even back in high school when he'd been able to draw that big golden bow without the armor's help.

"You like Thai food?" Cye asked.

"Yeah."

"We could call Kento, ask him to bring a movie. He could drive you home then. I don't have a car."

Rowen took the plate, staring at the graceful bones in Cye's wrist. He didn't understand how strange bumps under the skin came together into something humanly attractive. "Does your sister always think you're sleeping with anyone who's here before nine?"

"No... not usually." Suddenly Cye's eyes were slip-sliding to the walls. He retreated to the dining table near the door, but Rowen saw the blush anyway. He hurried after, reaching from behind to put down his plate, clattering against the wooden tabletop. He bent down, staring into Cye's face.

"Why me then?" he asked. Cye clasped his hands in front of his face, hiding his lips behind his curled fingers. His eyes were shut, like it wasn't obvious he was avoiding the question.

"It doesn't really matter, does it? Sit down, Rowen."

"No." He was close enough to see Cye's eyelid flickering with the breath of his speech. "Why'd she assume...?"

After a long moment, Cye responded lightly, "Probably because she holds gossip like some people hold grudges." Then, after a moment. "I had a terrible crush on you in high school."

"Oh," Rowen said. He didn't sit down. He hadn't realized before, but Cye had kind of a pointy nose. Beaky even, in a good sort of way. There must have been something different in his voice because Cye opened his eyes. They had gone from kelp-colored to stormy blue, suddenly alive with a secret sense of humor that most people never saw.

"Sit down or kiss me," he suggested sarcastically like he knew which option Rowen would choose. There was a foolhardy smile behind his hands.

"That was the plan," Rowen admitted, and almost lost his nerve.

He pushed Cye's hands away from his face and put his lips against the other man's, wondering somewhere in the back of his head whether Cye would taste like chicken. But the kiss might as well have been chaste except for the searing elation that rose from the pit of his stomach up to his brain.

He stopped, not knowing what was supposed to happen next, and Cye pulled away. His face held an eerie calm. He was staring at his food. For all the world as if nothing unusual had happened.

Rowen was disheartened.

After a second or two, Cye glanced at him with a very serious expression. "Are you going to kiss me again? Or was that just a joke?"

Which solved a whole lot of problems, since Rowen couldn't think of any conversation starters aside from 'I'm carrying your child' which was overdone and not true anyway. Also, Cye sounded like he might - just might - be fond of the idea.

"Okay," Rowen said.

He did much better the second time.


	6. in which things get a little odd

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

----

**Persuasion – chapter five**

**----**

Friday:

"You work on what? Cars? Skyscrapers? Death rays? What is it you _do_ for your conglomerate?"

"Law, actually," Rowen said.

Kento kicked back his head, swinging a sports bag in one hand. "You have a science degree."

"Yes," admitted Rowen, following after, one hand in a pocket, shaking the other in an educational manner. "But when it comes to fighting over patents, one needs a scientific mind amidst the professional bickerers!" He threw up his hands with a flourish, his voice expanding to cover a field rimmed with trees and quiet streets and chilly air. He dropped his arms with a sigh. "Otherwise who knows what the hell the patent is talking about anyway?"

"Makes sense," Kento allowed. He tugged off his gloves, stuffed them into his coat pockets before bending over to pull an oblong ball out of his bag. He offered Rowen an extra scarf, lobbing the football at him when the blue-haired man refused with a shake of his head.

"It's better than it sounds. It's actually kind of... interesting." He shivered, watching far away trees in seasonal yellow and red. "I keep trying for workplace apathy, but what can I say, sometimes it's _challenging_."

He held the football up as if to throw, but there was no one at the other end of the field. He suddenly remembered Ryo was in Africa. Conservation. Experiments in eco-tourism. Ryo's weird ass vacations.

Kento caught the ball Rowen tossed to him instead. He juggled it absently between his hands, puffing a breath at his dark bangs. "So, what about dinner?" he asked.

Rowen shrugged, staring at the field where Ryo should be. He gave up, jogged away from Kento across the grass. "I don't know," he called back. "Call whoever's home?"

Kento launched the football into a spin towards him. Rowen let out a whistle in the easy appreciation of something done right. He couldn't remember when Kento had picked up American football. He thought he remembered Kento joining the soccer team in high school.

"I can do that," agreed Kento, shouting across the distance. "I just... wasn't sure you'd be up for that. I was surprised you even called me, man. You haven't been doing that much. Recently."

"Ah." Rowen hesitated, turning the ball in his fingers, studying the textures in the rough leather. "I'm feeling a little better now."

"How about your girl? I mean, you used to be _engaged_, my man. What was her name? Amiko? Was she blonde or brunette? Hippy or scrawnier than yo_—_OOF." Kento clutched the football to his chest.

"Crazy," Rowen quipped. "I decided I couldn't afford the medication."

"Right." Kento grinned, didn't push it. Rowen's nerves smoothed out. The breeze was biting, cutting through his thin coat. He wished he'd brought his fleece headband, wondering when the weather was going to get around to snow. Kento was speaking. "You want to eat out or in?"

Rowen glanced at the sky. "It will be nasty by then. Let's stay in."

"Take out?"

"Can we make Cye cook? It's been years. Please?"

"I dunno," Kento said, slapping the ball against his other palm, surprised. "There's some stuff _he_ hasn't been doing much either."

"I know. He microwaved me leftovers"

"You ate with him? At his apartment?" Kento shook his head, almost a shudder. It was hard to see the motion at the other end of the soccer field and through Kento's big coat. Rowen squinted.

"Yeah, why?" He shouted over the cold wind, dodging back to catch Kento's throw.

"He's got this... soy sauce thing. On everything."

"I didn't notice!" He had, however, noticed other things. He was still struggling, four days later with what happened next. What did one do, seriously, after spending a few hours necking with a best friend?

Maybe he was just on the rebound. He touched the empty space on his ring finger, remembered a rash proposal and a giggling girl with bleached hair. He'd never even introduced her to anyone but Sage. He snorted. Of course he kept her away from them. He'd known even then that he was trying too hard to do the normal thing. That it couldn't really work. Even if Amiko was anything but normal.

Maybe Ryo was still in Africa.

"Only because he's properly embarrassed about it," Kento was shouting back. "Hiding his twisted habits!"

"Ha," said Rowen, and then they were too far away and the wind was too fast to talk about much of anything. He relaxed into the cold in his fingers, the sting of the ball as he caught it and the familiar pissing contest over which warrior of good could chuck an inflated piece of leather farther, faster, and inflict more damage on the receiver.

Kento was nodding in time to their laughter and the obligatory dick jokes when Rowen handed him the ball to be put back into the bag. Bent over, panting after a short, stupid round of tackle football with two, Rowen picked at the grass stains on his knees. His coat was discarded by the bag next to Kento's. He accepted it graciously, shrugged it gingerly over a t-shirt and dirt and sweat.

"This dinner tonight thing," Kento said suddenly. "I can call Sage too, right?"

Rowen stared at him.

"Just these things you haven't been doing recently," Kento went on. "I got the idea Sage was one of them."

"No," Rowen said flatly, and when Kento kept watching him, hunched as he was in obvious denial, added, "Don't call Sage. I will."

Kento seemed satisfied. Nodding sharply, jaw set. "Okay," he said. Rowen shivered and shoved his hands in his pockets.

----

Sage lived in his parent's house, like Kento, sleeping in the same room he'd used for as long as Rowen had known him. It was a weekday afternoon, though raining, when Rowen stepped up to the dojo entrance, knowing he'd interrupt a class and hoping it would be one Sage was teaching so he could stand in the back and watch.

And give fair warning.

He stepped through the door, leaving his sneakers at the entrance and looked across the big room with its springy floor. It was mostly empty of students; a woman a few years older than Rowen and in traditional Kendo dress was cleaning up after a class. A few students helped her while another was talking to the instructor, a vivid, forceful man in his seventies but hardly showing it.

Sage's grandfather looked up sharply, eyes snapping flawlessly to the intruder hovering in an old jacket and grass stains. The student cut off in the middle of a sentence, wary because the kendo instructor was in every way a predator. His old body continuously hummed with energy, in a way even his youngest students did not. To be near him was to be near something possibly dangerous and always inhuman. Like Bushido.

Rowen smiled disarmingly, shrugging. The old man was a lot like Sage in that.

He could see the old man snort and the student relax. Circling around master and apprentice, he wandered towards the back of the room and the muscular woman sweeping the mats.

"Hey, Yayoi," he said when he got close. She glanced up, looking him over once, skeptically, and went back to work. The student helping her, who was in fact older than both of them by at least a decade, peered around his teacher to study the new arrival.

"I've forgotten your face. You'll have to introduce yourself again," Yayoi said finally, not bothering to look at him after her first cursory glance.

Rowen grinned. Yayoi: never kind, always forceful, and often rude. It was like coming home.

"I've forgotten it as well, sadly," he said. "If I could borrow one of your mirrors? I know you have several..." Yayoi thrust the broom at his face, holding it like a wooden Kendo sword. He ducked under it, but out of habit didn't take it from her. No one ever expected him to be any good at martial arts.

"I am never vain, Rowen Hashiba," she warned him. Her face was china pale like her brother's, though her hair was black and gloriously long, tied carefully at the back of her head. Then she smiled. "Only beautiful. Go find my brother. He misses you."

"Is he here?"

"No," Yayoi said, and went back to sweeping.

"Right," Rowen gritted out. The charm of nostalgia was fading from Sage's older sister. "Will he be coming home... soon?"

Yayoi straightened, striding to the small office in the corner of the dojo, abandoning her curious students. She left the broom outside the door. Rowen didn't try to make conversation. She rooted through a desk for a moment before scribbling on a piece of paper, which she handed to him.

"He's visiting Satsuki," she said, pointing to the paper. "The address is there. I'll call him and tell him you're coming."

"Maybe you could give me the number," he suggested hopefully, "and I could call him."

Yayoi stared at him, one eyebrow raised in her alien face. As if to say, 'You come here after so long, you should be glad I make it this easy.' Sometimes the Date family drove him mad.

Sage included.

True to Yayoi's word, Sage was waiting outside Satsuki's building, hiding from the rain beneath a long awning. He was disappointingly real, with his arms held close to his body against the weather and with his head nodding as he hummed to himself to pass the time. Also, his hair was mussed. He did not live up to the memories of stark judgment and cold perfection from which Rowen had been hiding.

Rowen parked, exited into the rain with a quick shudder. It got in his eyes and made him blink like the meeting was more dramatic than it was. He walked right past Sage without saying a word.

Slowly, Sage fell into step beside him. He said, "I was a little surprised when my sister called."

"Yeah," Rowen said vaguely.

"Are we going somewhere?"

"No, just walking." Rowen stuffed his hands into his pockets. Rain dripped down his neck.

Sage reached out, gently pulled Rowen with him below the awning of the brown brick building. Lightning flashed, thunder rolled in. "There's a storm, you know. We can walk later." He frowned, looking Rowen over from head to toe, and Rowen hated him a little bit. "Yayoi said you looked sick, but I think it's the rain."

"I don't look sick. And stop standing there just because it's dry." He walked back into the rain, barely catching the fleeting edge of an expression on Sage's face. "What?"

It was not imaginary. Sage was stricken. And he would not take a step away from the awning. "We should go inside."

Rowen saw a chink in age old armor, and wished for an ice pick. He wanted to draw blood, but the instinct for violence was followed closely by the guilt of a civilized man. "Why are you afraid?" he said instead, aiming for indifference. There was water running everywhere and it made him think of Cye. "Lightning is your symbol. You should like it!"

And Sage replied, far too seriously, "What if it returns the favor?"

Paranoia. Rowen stood at the edge of the street, out of reach, watching the water course down the curbside, and lost himself in his own head. Sage was behind him, a brooding spot of calm, trailing storms wherever he went.

"You shouldn't be out here with me," Sage repeated. "Because of the storm. You want to pretend you're normal, that you're just a businessman in a cubicle, but you can do it later Come. Inside. Now."

"No," Rowen said, and walked away down the street towards a park that would be full of mud puddles and empty swings.

"_Rowen_," Sage hissed. He stepped forward to grip Rowen's arm in his long fingers. Rowen opened his mouth to give Sage the annotated list of reasons he was such a _prick_ -

But then he stopped thinking because something very horrible happened, and it was his own fault.

----

Mia answered the door in sweater a half a dozen sizes too large, pilfered from Kento's left-behind wardrobe. Sage stood on her door step alone. The storm was leaving in favor of fog, as though it had done what it came here to do. In the false night, his skin and the gold of his hair were unnaturally luminous. The rain had not completely washed away an acrid, disastrous smell.

"You'll have to help," he said, mysteriously. "He's in the car." Then he vanished, ghost-like, into the weather.

"Who?" she said and "Is he drunk?" but there was something somber in Sage's terseness. He never hurried. It was enough to convince her to run.

In was Rowen's car, with Rowen in the back as though asleep. Icy cold and utterly silent, but unmarked. Sage bent over him, peering through the opposite door, and his face was drawn so tightly as to erase all expression. He looked at Mia with empty eyes.

"A hospital wouldn't help," he said. "We don't heal like that."

"No," she agreed. So they did the only obvious thing. Night had fallen and the stars were bright.

----

Rowen opened his eyes to Ryo's face bending over him, holding back dark hair with one hand. Ryo was wearing a coat and a scarf, strange bedside gear, but there was no ceiling. Only stars and the snowy smear of the galaxy across the sky. He shifted, confused, and felt a blanket over him.

Sage's face was stuck in his head, more frightened than he'd ever seen it. Nothing made sense. Ryo touched his shoulder through the cover, worried. He was darker than he had been, the last time Rowen had seen him, but then Ryo soaked up sun like Cye did water.

"Fancy meeting you here," Rowen meant to say and croaked. He closed his eyes against the headache he'd just noticed, but stayed awake.

"Are you okay?"

"We're not camping in some muddy field are we?" he managed quietly. The storm was gone. He was mercifully dry.

"No, we're on the roof. At Mia's."

"Why?"

He felt Ryo shift when he shrugged. "Because we didn't know how to put you in space."

"Ah," Rowen murmured, nodding. "Exposure is by far the better choice."

He opened his eyes to see Ryo annoyed, exhaling strongly. His jacket was half unzipped, his gray scarf falling loosely onto his chest. Rowen stared dumbly at the exposed skin of his neck over the black band shirt and a long curl of black hair Ryo hadn't cut since before Rowen had finished undergrad. "You weren't _alone_," Ryo said, as if that made it okay.

Rowen felt the air mattress under him now, saw the edges of the little patio on the side of Mia's roof. He turned his head, watching Mia step out of an open skylight in jeans and a pale blue blouse. It probably wasn't very late, he decided, if she was dressed and he could hear sounds of life inside the house.

"Keisuke's on the phone," Mia said, holding the window open expectantly. Ryo looked at her like, 'so?' and didn't so much as flinch towards the house.

For that, Rowen decided whatever had happened was worth it.

"Oh," Mia said suddenly. "You're awake."

"Yeah. And about that. The hell?"

"Sage is furious. He was here until Ryo got home."

"Home?" Rowen stared at Ryo's face. The night and dull colors of his clothing muted his appearance, made him look boring, made Rowen forget he'd periodically been obsessed with soft lips and long eyelashes. "Aren't you in Africa?"

Ryo blinked at him and his disbelief turned into some sort of smile that he shared with Mia, lips parted with something he didn't know how to say.

"It's Saturday," Mia explained, stepping out on the tarred deck, wrapping her arms around herself and shivering. She put a hand to Ryo's shoulder where he sat cross-legged by Rowen's head, adding, "Saturday _night_."

"Well," said Rowen stonily, and with dawning understanding, "I _am_ an idiot."

Ryo offered softly, watching Mia's feet, "Sage thinks it's his fault though."

Rowen hesitated, flicking his eyes overhead from Virgo to Cassiopeia's crown. "Sorry."

Mia laughed. "You're apologizing to the wrong person!" but Rowen didn't take it back.

"How was Africa?" he asked instead, flexing his fingers painfully underneath the blanket and wondering if this was what other people felt when they were struck by lightning.

"Rainy," Ryo said.

"Really? I always think of antelope looking for water on nature shows."

"It was winter, mostly. Rainy season."

"Oh." Conversation trailed off.

"I want to get something straight," Rowen said finally. "Should I be dead?"

"I figure," Ryo said off-handedly, and Rowen jerked his head to stare at him, seeing Ryo's white teeth bared in an eerie patch of light against the dark.

Fire faded along Rowen's fried nerves. He realized Ryo was grinning at him.

I love you, Rowen said, but silently. Mia went back to the window.

"I'm going to get, Sage," she said, stepping through onto the step ladder below the skylight. "So you can tell him it's not his fault you got hit by lightning."

"But I thought it _was_ his fault. I thought that was the _point._"

"It's not his fault when you do something stupid," said Ryo.

Rowen pushed himself up to sit with bent knees under the covers, the blanket falling down to his waist. He tried to look casually sexy, but mostly he just felt cold, wishing for a thicker shirt. He didn't want to go inside. There was something powerful about the whole sky spread out above him, around him, swallowing him. He wanted to fall into it.

Sage climbed out of the window, alone. He was wearing a lot of black and green, also a coat and a thin pair of gloves. Almost, his hair and his neck were the only things bright enough for Rowen to see. He met Rowen's eyes calmly, self-incrimination starkly absent.

"I warned you," he said.

"I don't think that's actually any less clichéd than 'I told you so.'"

"I told you so," Sage agreed. He sat cross-legged next to Ryo.

"Okay, I noticed. But at the time, you sounded kind of paranoid."

Ryo laughed. Rowen eyed him but Ryo only stared back with wide, black eyes, their color hidden by the dark. They looked sad, a little regretful, and so clear, even though Rowen could only see them by the occasional reflected star.

Something clicked. Ryo wasn't surprised by what had happened. He'd known that the armors could do this.

Ryo stood like he meant to leave. As if Rowen and Sage needed to be alone.

Rowen was momentarily annoyed. He didn't understand what about this whole thing asked for privacy. It wasn't like it was anybody's fault, and frankly the whole premise made a lot of sense. Of course, Halo attracted lighting. Wasn't it the armor of spirit and thunderbolts? Case closed.

"It's my armor," Sage explained, as if Rowen didn't already know.

"Alright, fine. Should I have known about this before?"

Sage considered, watching the archer and the swordsman by the makeshift bed. Something in his face turned a little calculating and he caught Ryo's wrist as the other man tried to leave, jerking him down so he fell across Sage's knees like a blanket. Rowen thought it was about the strangest thing he had ever seen.

"NO," Ryo said, going a little panicked. Sage blocked a vicious jab at his stomach, grabbed Ryo's wrist and twisted. Rowen stared because they were _wrestling_, which Sage absolutely _never did._

Sage won, trapping Ryo across his lap with only his legs free where the only thing he could easily kick was Rowen's face. Rowen looked at Ryo pinned and furious in Sage's lap with his shirt riding up, a line of caramel skin under Sage's fingers, and knew that Ryo, as always, had no idea when he flirted with the borders of sexual deviancy.

Ryo made a second bid for freedom and Sage sighed, a certain resigned understanding on his face that turned Rowen's cheeks scarlet. He ripped Ryo's right arm away from his body, pulling up the sleeve of the jacket and the long-sleeve shirt underneath.

Spiraling around Ryo's forearm was a scar Rowen had never seen before, nasty and pale against brown skin. Ryo froze.

Without thought, Rowen lunged, getting a hold of an arm and dragging. Ryo weighed less than he remembered and fell, unresisting, across Rowen's bed. Rowen tried to remember when Ryo's obsession with long sleeve shirts had started. Summer, before Africa. He remembered Ryo pulling some bullshit about not feeling the heat. Coming from him, it had almost sounded plausible.

"What is that?" Rowen asked, hollow. Ryo didn't answer.

It looked like a burn scar, the skin strangely warped, like soggy pizza crust. Like someone had wrapped a rope from Ryo's wrist to his elbow, two inches between coils. A rope that had burned hot enough to scar someone who could stand in a volcano and not sweat.

"It was the same as the storm," Sage commented. "Things act up around us. Admittedly, this was a little... stranger."

"I understand the basics," Rowen snapped. "I want to know how _you got burned_." He glanced at Sage. "How did I miss this? Am I the only one who doesn't know?"

Now Sage hesitated. "I don't know." He looked at Ryo, who flinched and wrenched his arm from Rowen's grip.

"No," Ryo confessed finally after Sage stared at him patiently. He pulled his legs up to his chest, crossing his arms over his knees. "I didn't... tell anybody else."

"Why not?" Sage asked.

"It wasn't Keisuke's fault," Ryo said, awkwardly. The excuse sounded empty in the open sky. Unsaid: Rowen wouldn't have cared whose fault it was. He hated Keisuke anyway.

Rowen said, "Okay. Explain."

"There was a party," Ryo said finally, watching Sage. "I didn't know anybody there. I went with Keisuke. People were playing around with a painted circle and bad costumes – they were trying to raise a demon for fun. It was all stupid and harmless, but it sort of... got real when I came in. There was a – I don't know what it was, but it looked like a dragon, except cat sized and burning from the inside out. It came out of the circle and burned the carpet."

He watched Rowen reach out to trace the scar with his finger as he spoke. There was a distinct feeling of Rowen being _allowed_ to do so. Rowen wanted Keisuke to walk in and get an eyeful of his lap-skipping, too-sensuous boyfriend and Rowen's fingers trailing down his arm. Ryo added, "I think it tried to kill me."

"You think?" echoed Rowen.

"I don't know what it wanted to do. It's dead now."

"Good." Rowen met Sage's gray eyes, questioning.

Sage said, "Cye has trouble with waves. On boats."

"Is that why he stopped doing research? I thought he wanted to be a professor. Now I don't know what he thinks he's doing."

"No," Sage said. "But that was part of it. As for you, or Kento, I don't know." He looked away and possibly blushed, but his face was a picture of shadows on shadows, and it was impossible to tell. "I get people struck by lightning."

"It's happened before?" Rowen stopped tracing the dragon scar, looking up at Sage with his fingers curled around Ryo's wrist. For his part, Ryo was mostly silent. Rowen realized belatedly that Ryo had just gotten home from a flight across two continents and was probably getting hit by jet-lag on top of all of this. He touched Ryo's hair in apology, though he doubted Ryo was up to subtlety.

But Ryo murmured, "It's okay."

Sage didn't hear, thinking of Rowen's question, staring at the sky. Rowen wondered if Sage knew the same constellations he did. He couldn't revel in the hint of discomfort on Sage's face when his nerves were still shooting tiny pains like needles from his toes and the tips of his fingers. From Sage's lightning strike.

"No," Sage said. "It's never happened before. But it's felt... close. I don't think I could have protected anyone else." For a moment, his face was open, pained. Guilt mixed with the pain of Rowen's faulty nerves. "Anyone who wasn't one of us."

"I'm an idiot," Rowen promised. "I'm a really big idiot and it's not your fault. And I'm fine. I'm really, really hard to kill. I survived Kayura. Remember?"

"Maybe," Sage said dryly, but his face flickered with gratitude and Rowen tried to be satisfied. Then he said, thoughtfully, "Cye called us after you got hit. Even Ryo was clueless until he came home and we told him, but Cye called _us_."

Now even Ryo was watching Rowen curiously and Sage was smiling very slightly. Rowen said, "Oh? Did he?"

"Yeah," Sage said, and he was smiling visibly, "he did."

They lapsed into silence. The wind, brushing cold air against their faces, was a balm on Rowen's fading pain. His head felt heavy and his skin felt raw. At his side, Ryo's breathing deepened, exhaustion finally winning out over tension. It was not restful, like maybe it should have been. He wanted to be up, running, dancing. He wanted to remind his body that he was alive and healthy and powerful.

"I want to get up," he said.

"Why don't you?" asked Sage reasonably, leaning against the low wall that surrounded the patio. The whole thing was really a tarred depression in the greater slope of the pointed roof. Rowen tilted his head back, grinning stupidly, feeling the soft rise of Ryo's ribs against his arm where Wildfire slouched against him.

"He's asleep," Rowen explained. Sage laughed, reaching out to tug at the gray scarf around Ryo's neck. Rowen hissed at him. "Nonononopleasedon't."

"It's cold," Sage countered reasonably. "You got what you needed from it, I think. And the only reason nobody else has bothered us is they think they'd interrupt some kind of battle to the death."

Rowen stared at him. Sage said tiredly, "No one's really sure if you can stand me anymore."

Ryo shifted, opening his eyes. His expression clouded with confusion at finding himself on Mia's roof, lying next to Rowen.

"Yo," said Rowen. "You're not in Kansas anymore. You can tell – no giraffes."

Ryo opened his mouth, possibly to tell Rowen whether there were or were not in fact giraffes in just wherever he had been, but Sage interrupted.

"Rowen."

Somewhere there was the strength to answer honestly. Rowen groped for it, felt it brush his fingertips. "You ask too many questions," he said. "I don't like answering them sometimes. And I can never just brush you off."

He curled his body, wrapping a hand around Ryo's elbow and putting his head down against the slick fabric of the coat over Ryo's shoulder, breathing in his hair. It was strange moment, pressed together in what really could have been his deathbed, maybe, and Ryo let him do it.

He felt like he was in high school again. Just by being there, by smelling of cinnamon and wood smoke, Ryo reminded him that he'd saved the world once and everything else was just an epilogue.

Cye would find that horrifying. Better not tell him.

"I'm sorry," Sage said.

"No, it's me. I should be sorry."

"Have you seen Amiko?" Sage asked, and Rowen grimaced. Why did everyone insist on bringing up his ex-fiancé at every opportunity?

"No, and please don't ever mention her again." Ryo shifted, made a sound like a soft growl. Rowen pulled back.

"That won't go over well," Sage said calmly. "I think I'm the only one who ever met her. There are other interested parties."

"Cye goes to school with her. I'm not planning on telling him. Can we go now?" He pushed at Ryo's back. Ryo rolled off while Rowen kicked back the covers, rising unsteadily to his feet. His nerves felt bare, unreliable, but the sky was seeping into him, soothing them. He wondered if he shouldn't stay out here, breathe in the empty space, but he didn't think he could stand it, and besides, Ryo was awake. There wasn't much reason left to sleep.

He climbed inside, trying to pretend that Ryo hadn't gone first to spot him on the ladder, hands hovering at his waist. Or that he needed it, stumbling at the last step into Ryo's arms, which were jet-lagged but strong. Sage came last, watching Rowen's gracelessness, a little haunted behind his porcelain face.

Something flared at Rowen's chest. He stared down, pulling the chain from his shirt with the large, flashing orb at the end of it. He hadn't felt it outside, not even when Ryo's body should have been crushing it against his sternum.

Cye was standing at the landing, watching with his hands crossed over his chest. His skin was weathered, oldish. There was a half a second when Rowen couldn't imagine who he was, thought he was seeing an old science teacher from high school back to haunt him. The man at the end of the hall was too old. His hair had been cut. His clothes were grad student clothes, nothing he had to iron, absent-mindedly laundered. Cye frowned at the expression, and Rowen rubbed at his face.

"Aaugh," he said and Ryo put stabilizing hands to his ribs, startled. "I feel like I'm a teenager again. It's this house. I must be sixteen and a half. No! Fifteen!"

"Shock therapy," Cye suggested, then winced. "Sorry."

"Never mind." Sage pushed past, disappearing downstairs.

"That was bad," Cye remarked when he'd gone.

"That was funny," Rowen retorted, grinning. Cye had hickie below the collar of that shirt. Rowen stared at it, wondering if he could get Cye to blush, but Cye was watching Ryo's fingers on Rowen's ribs. There was no censure on his face. There wasn't anything at all.

Subdued, Rowen followed him downstairs and didn't give Ryo any reasons to hold him up.

Cye's shirt was cream colored, pressed and starched, though Cye had rolled the sleeves up to his elbows. Mia breathed a silly comment in Rowen's ear as she passed by: "It's not his. I made him change it."

"Change his shirt?" he repeated, catching hold of her blouse.

She pushed a platter of snacks into his hand. "You could see _his_ _entire neck._"

Rowen stared at her, feeling like the most obvious person in the world and suddenly without courage. Abandoning the snack bowl on a counter, he staged his escape. _Exeunt_ Rowen. Which was like an exit only better because it sounded French.

He'd meant to hide upstairs in his old room, but when he turned, he found that Cye had followed him up, lounging against the door frame with his hands behind his back and biting his lip. Pink-cheeked but sneaky. Rowen backpedaled, scrambling for the desk lamp.

Cye blinked in the light, his eyes gone very green. "You know," Rowen said, fingers in a death grip on the knob of the lamp. "I have issues. I'm probably not worth it."

"Oh, I don't mind issues," said Cye slowly. "I just like blue."

Rowen frowned. His nerves still sparked with lightning. "Fine."

Cye flinched a little. "I can go." He looked pained and suddenly very embarrassed.

"Fuck," Rowen said, rubbing his face with his hands. "And fuck you too. It's complicated." He went to his old desk and began, quite without direction, to pull books from the shelf Mia had bought him years ago. The books were worn and bent, missing covers. They were not old so much as well used.

In the doorway, Cye grinned cheekily. "Fucking is okay." Rowen ignored him. After a moment, Cye began to talk softly, aimlessly.

"I know it's strange, to think that we can do these things accidentally. That on a still day, the ocean might rise up and pay tribute, just because I'm there, when I didn't ever want it to. Up until now, which of us didn't feel like we had two lives? There were hero things and human things, and they stayed separate."

Rowen hesitated, his hand on the cover of a Murakami novel. Like the sea, Cye's voice had a natural calm, a familiar rhythm to be found in the flow of words, come anger or sadness or laughter.

"I ruined my sister's beach party last year," Cye was saying."I didn't know I could do it, and I didn't know what to do about it. But the waves were so high, nobody could swim. I had to rescue two of them before they all gave up."

"Was she mad?"

"How would she know it was me? No, she was mad this year, when I refused to go anywhere near it."

Cye was sitting on the desk, swinging a leg. As Rowen watched, he tilted his head so that the bruise on his skin was no longer hidden by the collar of a borrowed shirt. It was Ryo's. Which kind of made Rowen feel like Cye was walking around in drag – like Mia flirting with him in Ryo's ratty corduroy jacket a year ago, but Mia knew how to push his buttons like no other person alive. Cye was just trying to hide a hickie.

Cye said suddenly, "This is about Ryo."

"Yeah," said Rowen.

"What would you say to me, if I were Ryo?" Cye wondered, and grabbed at his wrists. It was meant to be flirty. It was just annoying. Rowen didn't like emotional things. He preferred things he was good at.

But he let his head fall back in consideration anyway, making faces at the top of his bookshelf. He turned his hands over Cye's wrist, creeping up his arms to the elbows and pulling Cye towards him.

"You'll think I'm very _strange_," he said.

Cye raised an eyebrow. Rowen's breath smelled of tomato sauce and spice.

"I mean," said Rowen, "that I don't talk to Ryo. It wasn't something we ever did. He was just... around."

"Well. If you _did_ talk to him."

"I would say," Rowen explained, "that you make me want to save the world."

Cye stared at him and a slow, wondering smiled spread across his face. Rowen dropped Cye's arms, flustered, and turned back to his books. Then Cye was tossing his head and hiding any wonder behind a theatrical show of nonchalance.

"Doesn't sound like a bad thing," he said, in character. "I am the selfless heroic type. Perhaps we have something in common?"

Rowen grinned suddenly, rakishly, with his hands on the spine of an old samurai action story. "No," he told the shelf. "It doesn't work that way. Because the world doesn't need saving anymore, and I need to pay my taxes."

Cye laughed, which Rowen had been waiting for. Turning his head, Rowen watched Cye's eyes shut, counting each individual eyelash as it touched his skin. He was nothing at all like Ryo, but Rowen was tired of that particular ache. Cye opened his eyes and smiled, showing white teeth against pink lips. Rowen dropped the book and kissed him then, on his old desk surrounded by dusty science fiction. He tugged at Ryo's shirt on Cye's body, snapping off a button, but this was Cye, and he didn't want Cye to smell like cinnamon.

Cye was smiling at him, amused. He didn't understand, but Rowen was losing his taste for explanations. Ryo was the one that he knew almost better than himself and what good had that done? He threw the shirt across the room. Cye touched his face, his neck, leaned down to kiss the hollow place above his collar bone.

Power engulfed him, the same familiar power that had brought him back from death and healed him on a rooftop. He saw the earth from the place of Strata's power, encased in sapphire light far above ground. He didn't remember how to get back down.

Somewhere on earth, Cye helped him pull his shirt over his head, breathless and smiling as Rowen smiled. There was a hand on his thigh and his head was thumping with power, chanting _Strata Strata Strata Strata. _He was kissing Cye in Mia's house and there was a sky above him, giant, endless.

Beneath him, an ocean.

"Rowen," Cye said, and for a second the voice was the sound of waves against an unseen shore. He started; he was in his own head again, his hands resting on Cye's shoulders, but he couldn't remember what they were doing there. Cye touched something on his chest, and he felt the armor orb of Strata resting there. "Are you going to take that off?"

"I... don't know. Should I?" The marble was cool against his skin. Its power flared as Cye rolled it between his fingers, and Rowen was suddenly terrified that it would pull him away again, to the endless place between water and sky.

"You're the only one who still carries it around," Cye murmured. "Why?"

"I'm paranoid," he said breathlessly. "Look, I'll take it off."

"Alright," Cye said, and shrugged. He'd felt nothing. Rowen left it on the floor beside the bed, hidden under his discarded shirt, and didn't shudder away from Cye's hands pulling him back to the bed.

Soon the memory faded into something entirely more pleasant.


	7. and people appear in doorways

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

----

**Persuasion – chapter six**

**----**

Rowen sucked at a soda straw, leering subtly at the redhead pushing open the swinging door of the theater lobby. Cye didn't notice; he was throwing up his hands, his coat over one arm, and vowing never to get into anime again. Because, really, it was just the same thing over and over again and _didn't Naraku ever die?_

The movie hadn't seemed to terribly disappointing to Rowen, but then he hadn't been paying much attention. He pried the plastic top off his drink, peering at the ice the remained in the bottom. Next to him, Cye was pulling on his navy ski coat, so he turned his back and palmed an ice cube, superficially studying the red carpeted lobby. Outside, they walked to Rowen's little Hyundai, and Rowen stepped up and slipped his icy hand under Cye's warm layers, next to skin. Cye screamed bloody murder and nearly twisted Rowen's arm out of its socket.

"I'm a dangerous martial artist, you know," he hissed.

"Errrkh," said Rowen. Then he grinned brilliantly, which he had discovered led to advantageous effects. Cye's grip loosened, his expression smoothed. He leaned forward until they were nose to nose.

And something slid around Rowen's heart.

Awareness of the armor rose up in his mind, chilly like a soft breeze on wet skin. He felt the pull: it was an iron band around them both, constricting until wind was pressed into water. Alien and terrifying.

With wind whipping at his red bangs and his hands tight on Rowen's forearm, Cye kissed him.

----

Kento said, "He can't say mad forever."

Cye lived in a white building across the street from a train station and a half mile away from a decent comic book store that Rowen had learned to love. Today, Kento sat next to him on the front steps and watched him throw peanuts at bicycles.

Rowen stared up at the building's dark windows, digging his thumbnail into the shell of a peanut from the bag propped between his ankles. Shortly, he turned back to the street, imitating a shrug with the tilt of his head.

"I think you're underestimating me," he said.

"Fine. So what'd you do?"

Rowen hesitated, gazing across the street at a bare branched urban tree. Another long moment of thought. He shook his head, returning to his bag of nuts. "Never mind."

Kento sighed explosively. "Right. Whatever."

"Maybe," Rowen mused dreamily, "it's not too late to kill Keisuke, hide the body, and comfort Ryo in his grief."

"I seriously hope you're kidding."

Rowen eyed him. "You have so little faith in my non-murderous nature?"

"No offense, but – hello, _Keisuke._" Kento's breath puffed white in the cold.

"You all think I'm crazy." Rowen flaked the papery covering off a nut, squinting against the cold. "That it's just because of Ryo."

Kento shrugged. It was noon in December; pedestrians in coats and hats hurried by on the sidewalk in front of them. Rowen flicked his finger and launched a peanut shell from his palm after a passing cyclist. The two of them were bundled up and red-faced on Cye's steps, banished from warmth. Or presumably, Rowen was, with Cye reportedly in a fury, but Kento wasn't so sure he wanted to brave the emotional mess Rowen swore he'd left behind.

"Fine," he said to the blue haired man beside him. "Why don't you like Keisuke if it has nothing to do with Ryo?"

Rowen shot back, "How come you _do_?"

Kento grimaced, rubbing his gloved hands together, thinking hard. After a moment, he said, "Because he's nice to Ryo."

Rowen paused. "That's it?"

"What'd you want me to say?" Kento demanded. "He can be fun, but he's pretty self-important. Also, even when he's being nice, he still smokes until Ryo goes completely asthmatic on him."

Kento stopped. His face was set in a frown, and he stomped his boot irritably on a lower step. Rowen pursed his lips and did not speak. Eventually, he held out his hand without looking up, offering a peanut on his palm asa cleartoken of peace. Kento took it with a rueful smile.

"...you know Sayoko?" Rowen asked reluctantly, speaking of Cye's elder sister.

"Yeah," Kento said, pulling the nuts from the shell. "I know Sayoko."

"Half the times I see her, she won't even give me the time of day."

"Isn't like that to Cye," Kento pointed out.

"Yes, exactly. She isn't like that to Cye. And I... It's like I have to admire her taste." Rowen drooped, returned to staring after the rare bicycle that dared the cold.

"It's the same," Kento agreed. "I don't suppose... maybe you should cut Keisuke a little slack?"

Rowen snorted.

"Fine," Kento said with pronounced disgust. Rowen shrugged, but it was a brittle motion.

"You remember," he said, "when I told you it had nothing to do with Ryo? Why I hated him, I mean."

"Yeah."

"I was lying through my teeth about that."

Kento laughed. "You think?" He looked back up the steps towards Cye's building. "At least tell me, why _is_ he mad?"

Rowen shifted, rubbing the back of his neck. "Have you ever read any of the histories Mia has? The ones her grandfather collected?"

"No, never."

"They're – well, they're a little creepy sometimes. Because you realize we didn't fight for very long, and that really, we don't know much about our armors. How else would they get away from us like they do - when Cye accidentally causes thirty foot waves and Sage gets me struck by lightning? Because we're _amateurs_."

Kento was unimpressed. "I know Cye didn't get mad about _that_."

"Shut up, I'm not finished. Right, so anyway, the question comes up: how does an armor choose who wears it? And how does it know when to protect its bearer? When Kayura threw me off the castle, _I_ didn't know how to fly, but I did it anyway. I can promise you it wasn't _me_ that did it."

"So? I'm missing something."

"Only the structure of the question itself! 'Choose', 'know'! How can an inanimate object _do_ those things? That's the point, really. They aren't. Inanimate."

Kento leaned forward, wariness pricking in the back of his eyes. "What do you mean?"

It was Kento, after all, who Dais had half-convinced of the inherent violent desires of the armors. That to use them was to become what they were meant to be: raging, soulless evil. All of them had nearly been killed by the effects of that speech, as Kento stared at the battle before him and refused to call his armor even to save his friends. He'd gotten over that. Barely fast enough to avert disaster. He'd become the one of them all who knew his armor best because he never made the mistake of forgetting it was there. Or doubting its power.

"The armors are meant to be able to take care of themselves if their bearers aren't up to snuff," Rowen explained. "They can... influence us. To force a fight. Or a retreat. Like with Kayura and me."

Kento stared.

"Peanut?" Rowen held out the bag politely.

"Uh... no thanks," said Kento.

"Right, sorry." Rowen picked out a nut for himself. His cheeks were flushed. "So... I was thinking, that if the armors are capable of... influencing us in their best interest – "

"What the hell is their 'best interest'!" Kento exploded. They were not alone; a woman with a dozen strands of grey in her hair tugged her son past them hurriedly at Kento's shout.

"Yes, yes," Rowen shushed him with a wave of his hand. He was hunched over his fingers, peeling away a peanut shell in tiny, unnecessary pieces. "Theoretically, it should be our best interest as well.

"But back to the question. The closer the bond between those who wear the armors, the better they function. Especially with Inferno thrown into the equation, right? So here's the problem: when combat isn't reinforcing that bond, what happens? Consider this: that it seeks to _continue_ strengthening those bonds - _anyway it can_."

Kento breathed out in a long rush of air, heavy with realization and relief. "You mean Cye."

"Yes – "

"Those waves he calls up by accident. That happens because he's been ignoring his armor, is what you're saying. And it's trying to break through."

Rowen blinked. "Er... yes... that does make sense, but that's not what I – "

"And you, because you've been carrying yours around, it hasn't happened to you. But Sage, when he..."

Rowen was staring at him wide-eyed, lips parted and utterly confused.

"That's... not what you meant," Kento guessed.

"Well," Rowen said. He opened his hand and peanut shell and peanut fell in pieces to the sidewalk. "Not as such, no."

Kento waited. Rowen did not explain. "What then?" he prodded.

"Like I said, the bond... between the armors, they want to strengthen it...even if..." He trailed off.

"I told Cye it was the armors' fault," he said numbly.

"What was?"

"_Us_."

----

Rowen blew in through the back door. He kicked his way in from the kitchen and halted, wind fluttering the pages of the research papers arrayed on the dining room table.

Mia reigned over it all with a discerning eye, felt pen tapping bouncing absently in her fingers. She looked up as he burst in, her pretty face pulling itself into a puzzled frown. Rowen stood in the kitchen door, dressed in a long, dark wool coat and a trailing scarf. A blue duffle was clenched ominously in his hand.

"Rowen?"

"I just...um... would you mind if I stayed here? Not for long."

Mia set down her pen. "Of course not. Why?"

"Thanks. Don't like my apartment." He waved hastily, leaping up the stairs. The door slammed, and he could feel Mia grimacing at his back from her fortress of essays.

But he needed to run, to flee, and this was the oldest bolt hole he knew. Kento was wrong. Kento thought if you ignored the armor, you lost control of it, that it crept up on you and showed itself when you least expected it. But Rowen hadn't done that. Of the five of them, only he still carried his armor with him in the form of an orb at the end of a chain, bouncing against his breast as he walked. He hadn't been ignoring his armor, he _wasn't_ like Cye or Sage or Ryo. If that's all there was to it, this wouldn't be happening.

His armor was thrumming in his head, along his veins. He felt alive and powerful, like he hadn't since the war. Except there weren't any bad guys left to fight, and he just wanted to be able to go to work in the morning without the itching desire to leap into the air and fly higher and faster than the jetliners leaving trails across the sky.

Because he knew he could if he wanted to.

On his second day at Mia's house, Ryo stood at the edge of the bed and asked him what was wrong. Rowen sat crossed-legged in the middle of the comforter and didn't answer. He was doing crossword puzzles with a tiny pencil in the back of an activity book he'd found in Mia's bathroom.

In the hallway, half hidden by Ryo's body, was a tall, wide man who looked like an American jock. He had honey colored hair and a strong jaw, which was clenched in annoyance. He didn't look at Rowen and Rowen didn't look at him.

His name was Keisuke.

Ryo crouched by the bed and stared at Rowen like the archer was his whole world. Keisuke grimaced. Rowen snapped, and soon enough they left for someplace more welcoming. As Ryo left, he stepped over Rowen's messy duffle, hastily packed with wrinkled clothes and thick wool socks and a single cherry picture frame, resting face down on top of it all.

On the third day, Rowen climbed out the window onto the balcony and tried to fly. He did not now how to do it or what it would be like, only that there was a certainty in his chest that he _could_ do it and that he should. He didn't understand why when this certainty told him to leap from high places he believed it, but when it told him to love Cye, he ran away.

----

Mia came home after Rowen did, usually. She'd come home to see Rowen's red Hyundai in the drive and wonder if on some days he'd just been staying home.

Her house was in order, the research papers graded and stacked on stained wood. Rowen was in his old room with the door closed. Ryo was gone, out with Keisuke, which was either preference or a symptom of lingering anger with Rowen who had a knack for being complicated.

She dropped her bag by her temporary work station in the dining room and padded up the stairs to knock softly on Rowen's door. When he didn't answer, she inched it open, afraid he might be sleeping, but she could see his back through the open window where he stood on the balcony wearing a gray sweater and dark jeans.

Cold air touched her face as she went to the window to close it or call him inside. But when she put her hand on the windowsill, she faltered. Rowen stood on the opposite side of the balcony railing with his hand's propped behind him on the painted wood, knuckles towards her. Hearing her footsteps, he turned his head over his shoulder and smiled.

His feet stood on air, barefoot, supported by nothing at all.

He lifted his hands from the railing and threw out his arms to embrace the world. In her mind, Mia saw gravity reassert itself, and she scrambled out the window in her socks and cardigan, underdressed and panicked.

But Rowen didn't fall. Winds she had not felt outside her front door buffeted his clothes, kicked at his legs like he weighed no more than cardboard. And he didn't fall.

"Look, Mia," he breathed, bending towards her, kneeling on a breeze, "I can _fly_!"

He sounded all too ordinary, his voice raspy with a sore throat from standing outside shoeless in December. His eyes glittered, his cheeks were bright. His face was full of wonder. Mia stared at the empty air beneath his feet with the wind against her face.

She put her hands to her mouth and without meaning to, mirrored his quietness. "Oh my god."

Rowen giggled, a ridiculous, disbelieving sound, and reached out his hands to her over the balcony, a fleshy bridge from the real to the fantastic. "Oh my god!" she said again, and let him pull her into the grey sky.

"How is this possible?" she cried.

"Don't know," Rowen said and laughed at her arms around his neck, her fingers digging into his shoulder blades. "But it's unbelievable!"

He drew them upwards, above the roof, until they could see the lake spread out beneath them and Mia's house was the size of his hand at arm's length. The wind tossed them little distances, playfully. Mia was a light as a falling leaf; trapped by winds Rowen seemed to have no awareness of controlling. His delight at each new success played across his features for all to see. Mia wondered if she should be a little more nervous about flying with what was obviously a rank amateur.

"Why didn't you do this before?" she asked, speaking into his ear, cheek to cheek, peeking at the horizon past his shoulder. His skin was icy cold.

"I couldn't before," he said. "I don't know how. I just knew I could do it now."

He pulled back to watch her anxiously with his arms tightly around her waist. Her fingernails bit into his shoulder as foreboding uncurled sick fingers in her gut.

"Rowen," she whispered, "what if – what if your armor is reaching out like this because something is going to happen? Something bad?"

Laughter burst from his lips, dying slowly, but then it was gone, and he was staring out towards the lake, at the thick ice creeping away from the shore. By February, it would be completely iced over.

"No," he said. "It's not bad guys. It's... it's Cye. He started it."

"Cye?" she repeated, startled. "How?"

He dipped; the ground neared by half a dozen feet. Mia beat at his shoulders, letting out a shriek.

"Happy thoughts, Rowen! Happy thoughts!" Her eyes were locked onto her little car, on her house and her yard, all in breath-taking miniature far, far below.

"It's OK! OK!" They slowed. The fall transformed into a controlled descent, and their feet touched the balcony to the sound of a cell phone chiming brightly from Rowen's bedside. Shivering now that the excitement had passed, Mia had one leg over the window sill when she noticed Rowen still staring at the sky and dashed back to pull him in after her.

He seemed disoriented by the confinement of four walls and a roof above his head. She could see that his ears and his nose were a bright, rosy red like his fingertips. He didn't have a coat any more than she did, and he was barefoot. She closed the window behind them while Rowen shook his head and breathed hot air onto his fingers. With one motion, she swept the comforter from the bed, spinning it in the air and around his shoulders. He blinked at her and smiled shyly, like a child just becoming aware of some silly thing he's done.

"Forgot my coat," he said.

"That you did." She tucked it around him, pushing him to the bed, and snatched up the cell phone.

"Ami," she read off the digital face, and flashed the display at him.

"Oh!" Rowen grabbed for it, flipping it open hastily. "Hello! Hello?"

Mia went down the kitchen, making hot cocoa mechanically, beginning to feel as dazed as Rowen had seemed upon discovering the laws of physics still in working order on the ground. Her pulse still beat loudly in her ears and she could feel the wind beneath her arms lifting her up like it should never have been able to. Like magic.

Her house! Below her like a doll's house! And Rowen, who wielded this power like instinct and said Cye had given it to him. Or awoken it.

The microwave dinged. She took a mug in each hand, warmth seeping into her fingers and up her arm, but by the time she'd left the kitchen, Rowen was already at the door, cell phone wedged between shoulder and ear, pulling on socks and boots. He shot her an apologetic look, looping shoelaces into tight bows. The peace he'd found above the earth was starkly absent in the frantic movements of his fingers.

He kissed her cheek, vanished out the door with a cup of chocolate. Mia stood in her dining room, a warm mug in her hands, and felt weighted down by gravity.

----

Once upon a time:

Sage met Rowen's fiancé in a most inauspicious way. On a Wednesday night in summer, he stood at the window watching two shadows giggle their way to his doorstep. They passed beneath a street light, glinting blue and blonde. He opened the door even as the girl held her swaying finger over the bell.

"What did you do to her? How much has she had to drink?"

Someone had stenciled a heart on Rowen's cheek in red face paint. At Sage's question, he tapped itonce awkwardly with the whole length of his finger, smearing it down to his jaw. "Drink? I don't know... she's always like this... Neh, Ami-chan?"

Ami-chan laughed and nipped at his ear. Rowen grinned with delight.

Sage surveyed the giggling girl skeptically as she oozed over Rowen, the dead straw hair, the bent barrettes, and the spiraling lines of the clouds tattooed around her thin neck. "Rowen, what is it you aren't telling me?"

With his blue brows raised, the tall archer was surprised, but he quickly brightened. "Oh! Um... we're engaged?"

Sage had no words to say.

----

Rowenhadn't been expecting the phone call. There hadn't been any talk at all for months. He was reasonably certain he'd have heard if she'd died. Now suddenly he lands on Mia's balcony and there she is, calling him back to an uncomfortable reality with the familiar sound of a cell phone ring. So he'd dashed out the door to an old meeting spot, one of his shoelaces in an indecipherable knot and spilling hot cocoa across the passenger seat.

When he saw her sitting on the bridge in her leggings and galoshes, she was so completely as he remembered her that for a moment he was unmoored in time. But it had been six months, and he was already reviewing a mental list of all the things he would and would not tell her about his Life since Her.

He had not yet made up his mind about Cye.

She looked up from the paperback propped on her knees with its cover curled back around the spine, and he realized that she had nothing new to tell him. She was the same easily distracted girl, the one who had never failed to be surprised to see him, forever reaching up on her toes to touch his improbable hair.

From there, everything was simple but painful. Because she had not changed, he could see in every movement how he had fallen for her that first time and in doing so, nearly fell all over again. But she looked up at him with cool eyes empty of rekindled romance and handed him the last bag of his things. He'd never had any of hers; she was a girl proud of her neuroses, and she didn't leave anything behind.

(He remembered that he had loved watching her rearrange his book shelf once a week, smiling at the distressed peeps that marked her progress.)

When she left, bobbing her head to mental melodies, he realized that in the entirety of their romance he had never been enough of a disturbance in her life that his removal could leave a scar. Was that a requirement of love? Not only a joy to have but an agony to lose? Must life before love, which had once been more than adequate, now seem pallid and crude?

Amiko walked away. She was humming the tune of his philosophical despair. Perhaps thirty feet below him flowed a sorry excuse for a river, rolling languidly over rocks and brush on its way into the aqueduct to begin its passage through civilization.

Then, as it had been recently, he felt Strata stir, picking at stray whistles and whips, breezes and zephyrs. They surged together into a wind, blowing across the river and into him and through. The armorrose inhis mind like a favorite song playing in the background, inaudible except for its familiarity. He was aware that no one else on the bridge had noticed it, rooted to the ground like humans should be. Only he was too light, like a paper crane, and he knew all of sudden that he was going to fall. The wind would toss him over the bridge, down to the rocks of the shallow river.

He could already feel them in his head, rushing up to hit him. It was as disorienting a sensation as kissing Cye.

Then, as if the thought had called it, he felt the water, so much stronger and majestic in his head than it was in the concrete ditch beneath, singing on its way to the sea. Pulling him back to earth. He opened his eyes; found himself standing there, safely grounded, right where he had been with a hand on the rail.

At the end of the bridge was Cye.

Torrent was coming towards him, breathless, worried, with something clenched in his fist. Rowen knew what it was; he could feel his own pressing against his chest like a lead weight. He remembered that iron band constricting as Cye kissed him, his armor calling to Cye's, pulling them together without bothering to ask whether he liked it that way or not. It was still as frightening as it had been a week ago.

So he ran. Because he'd always been a little claustrophobic.

----

Mia met Rowen at the back door as he stepped inside, grabbing his arm so he couldn't pass. He suddenly remembered that not three hours ago, he had been more than a hundred feet above the earth, flying without his shoes on.

(Kento was wrong. Rowen knew what he felt when he kissed Cye. This wasn't the same as Sage or Ryo, whose armor had the decency to go haywire around their own elements and not latch onto another of their kind with creepy, nonconsensual consequences.)

The room was the laundry room, luxurious in the winter with hot water pipes heating the stone tiles beneath one's feet. Rowen basked in warm air against his face, shivering quietly beneath his coat.

Mia said very quietly, "Ryo and Keisuke have broken up. Don't make a scene." Then she was stepping past him the way he had come, scooping up a laundry basket as she went.

Rowen stayed where he was, stuck in one spot. Everything had gone cold.

Opportunity, it seemed, knocked at its own discretion with a firm grasp of irony in its raised fist.

"So he's single?" he asked, his voice rich with self-mockery.

"Rowen!" Mia snapped from behind him, pulling warm clothes from the dryer.

He straightened, setting his shoulders, and strode through the kitchen door, feeling that he had only a limited supply of determination and it was therefore was vital to get things done quickly before supplies ran out.

There were boxes in the hallway; two of them and a brown paper bag which brought to mind his own goodie bag of rejection, clenched in his hand, chock full of returned clothing, an old toothbrush, and a purple plastic comb.

Ryo was there also, damp from the shower, crouched in gray sweat pants and not much else, poking listlessly through one of the boxes. He looked up at Rowen's energetic entrance, his long black hair down and tangled, sticking a little to his neck.

"What's this?" Rowen asked, deceptively casual, halting only when he towered over the other man. Ryo pushed himself up with his hands on his thighs.

"Nothing," he said dully, as though the world no longer held any meaning. His head dipped, and long, fine hair fell across his face like a web of midnight. There was a flush across his cheeks, under his dark skin. He looked bereft and slightly feverish and, to Rowen's eyes, devastatingly sensual.

Rowen cleared his throat, staring down at Ryo's bare back and the ridge of his spine under caramel skin. For a shadow of an instant, he debated mentioning that he'd thought Keisuke was kind of a fuck. Instead, he lifted Ryo's face delicately with one hand along his jaw and kissed him with great passion and little sweetness. It was the gratification of years of longing and terror both, and Ryo hit the wall with a sound of surprise that never left Rowen's mouth.

In so much as Rowen could _think_ at all, leaning into Ryo and touching Ryo's skin, it came to him that he needed to tell someone about this. That the impossible had happened and at least one other person out of the five billion on the planet had to _know_.

As he thought this, he wondered if Cye were still angry with him because he of all people would understand the euphoria pulling Rowen off his feet.

His next thought, sensibly enough, was to wonder how he could possibly _tell Cye about this._

That was when Ryo punched him.

"What the fuck?" Ryo shouted, when Rowen looked so surprised, sprawling across the floor and pressing two fingers against his split lip.

"Ow! What the hell!"

"What were you _doing_!"

"I thought you were single. You're not? Shit, you _punched _me. God damn OW."

"That – doesn't – how does that make SENSE?"

"Oh, come on! Like you weren't dating him just to piss people off!"

"What!"

Ryo took a step towards him, and Rowen never knew exactly what he meant to do because Mia was suddenly there putting a hand to Ryo's slick chest, demanding of both of them: "What the hell is going on here? What are you two thinking?"

Ryo backed away, crossing his arms and staring at Rowen with his absurd eyes. Blue, dark and deep. Rowen rolled to his knees, head bent towards his feet with his left hand held stiffly in front of him, blood on his finger tips. He stared at it morosely just as Ryo said, indignantly, "He kissed me!"

Mia turned a disbelieving stare on the tall man with the bloody lip kneeling like a supplicant on her floor.

"It seemed like a good idea at the time," admitted Rowen, wiping at his lip with the back of his hand.

"Of all the – " Mia stopped, and Rowen dared to look up. A lanky seventeen year old was gawking at them from the living room doorway, a textbook open in his hands, a pencil perched precariously behind his ear.

"Holy shit," the teenager said, staring vacantly at the scene laid out before him.

"Uh," Rowen cleared his throat awkwardly. "Hi, Yuli."

----

"Look, all I'm saying is it's possible to get a crush on someone of the same sex without being sexually attracted to that person. It _happens_."

Yuli had kicked back on the kitchen table, one arm crossed over his chest with his hand resting in the crook of the opposite arm, the other gesturing to emphasize his points. He moved without subtlety, and his eyes slid off of Rowen like worn soles on a wet floor.

Rowen stood nearby, bent over the newspaper, smoothing the page with one hand, holding his toothbrush between his teeth. Under any other circumstances he would have left Yuli behind a dozen tactless sentences ago, but he had been barred from the second floor under the assumption that if given a second chance, Ryo might really break his jaw.

Déjà vu. At least Cye hadn't been _violent_.

He'd expected Cye to be hurt. To feel rejected when Rowen told him the truth: that they'd only been attracted because their armors were reacting strangely. That it was a fluke and false in every way. Also, that he was sorry about it.

Instead, Cye told him he had the IQ of a drunken, brain damaged parakeet if he believed such a thing. It had been those words exactly; Rowen had made an effort to remember them. There had been something so very _Cye_ about the phrase.

"People are unwise to link sex and affection so irreversibly," Yuli rambled. "The human heart is a complicated thing. Just because you have a crush on another man, doesn't make you queer – "

He'd deserved the punch, of course, for all he wasn't sure he felt any sincere remorse. Ryo was sex on two legs and didn't know it. Which made it worse.

But he felt a hundred times the fool. There was a big wad of stupid lodged in his chest that ached with a physical pain. He was surprised to feel it catch as he breathed. It felt a little bit like his heart, which explained how romantics over millennia could have mistaken it for the organ of love.

Love and pain. All the best pop songs insisted they were inseparable. Could so many bestsellers be wrong?

He browsed the sports page while he worked on his molars, ignoring Yuli's rambling shock with the ease of indifference. His toothpaste was cool wintergreen, and he would smell of lifesavers in his sleep.

('Rowen,' Cye's voice raged in his head, 'why would my armor be pulling at yours? That's Inferno's job, not mine! Why don't you go after _him?'_

Rowen had walked out. Snatched up his bag of groceries, peanuts enclosed, and caught Kento on the stairs.)

Yuli was still talking. Rowen took the toothbrush from his mouth.

"Just to be clear," he said, speaking loudly to drown out the incoherence caused by a mouth full of toothpaste. "Are you trying to reform me? Sexually?"

Yuli stared.

"Because," Rowen went on, "I'm all for reform through sexual means. Good fun to be had all around with that." He bent back to his newspaper, tucking the toothbrush into his cheek.

"That's – That's not what I meant."

"That's utterly what you meant," Rowen said, without looking up. "And in about two and a half seconds, you're going to extend the olive branch of peace by telling me that you too had this totally antisex mancrush on Ryo... "

(Cye screamed at him, 'YOUR ARMOR DID NOT MAKE YOU GAY.')

"I was not!"

"SO WERE." Rowen spit lifesaver-tasting toothpaste into the sink. A small oversight: in the presence of any of the Ronins, when he wasn't speaking like a formal essay gone wrong, Yuli forgot he was no longer eight. "And just for the record," Rowen added, jabbing his toothbrush in Yuli's direction,"to call what I feel for Ryo platonic is like calling Columbus' stupid idea a shortcut to the Indies."

The back door opened. Someone stomped across the laundry room's heated tile floor. Cye appeared at the kitchen door, red cheeked from the cold.

"Hello," he said, seeing Yuli first, "have you seen Mia...?" Then as Rowen winced with his back to Cye by the sink: "You! Is this where you've been? What are you doing – trying to get back to your mother's womb?"

Rowen wiped his mouth on a dishtowel, laying his toothbrush by the sink. He said slowly, "This house you mean? Nine months is about right, come to think of it. Though all that popping in and out must have been odd."

"Mia's upstairs with Ryo," Yuli said. "But walk lightly. Ryo's pissed as hell."

Cye blinked, derailed. "Pissed? Why?"

The question fell into a sudden silence. Yuli hesitated, and Rowen whirled, abruptly anxious. "Please, please, take back that question."

"What on earth?" Cye said.

Yuli crowed, "He kissed him!"

Cye demanded, "Who?"

Rowen moaned, "Anything but this."

Unsympathetic, Yuli pointed at the man cringing by the sink. "He – " Yuli aimed his finger towards the ceiling at an invisible warrior, "kissed HIM."

"RYO?" Cye shrieked.

And Rowen roared, leaping away from the counter, "WHY IS THIS A NEW DEVELOPMENT!"

Cye said, "You are not in love with Ryo!"

"I SO FUCKING AM."

"Don't be an idiot! You spend a dozen days in hell with a guy and you turn it into an obsession. He is NOT DEAD. Sex will not raise your confidence in this fact, you bloody necrophiliac! Get OVER it!"

Rowen thrust out a hand, pointing past Cye's shoulder. Mia was in the doorway, an empty cocoa mug in hand. "And HER?" he said "She does it too!"

"Does what?" Mia asked with steely calm. Yuli let out a breath. The fury in the room plunged.

"He says he's in love Ryo," Cye said after a pause and at a far less excited volume.

For a moment, Mia merely stared, as though she had expected something of far greater earth-shattering importance. Then she smiled, a little twitch of her lips, coming into the room at a saunter, stopping in front of Rowen with a hand on her hips. "But he is so cute when he sleeps," she said. "How can you resist?" She leaned past him to drop the empty mug in the sink. "Well?"

He grinned down at her. "Have you seen the way he hugs his pillow?"

"Forget the pillow; the tiger!"

"Oh, remember when – "

"YES." She pressed her hands palm to palm in front of her face and seemed barely able to suppress a fangirlish squeal.

Yuli sat on the kitchen table, head in his hands. "This is _not_ happening," he moaned. "You guys are _so_ embarrassing."

Mia only laughed at him, but Rowen froze, staring over her shoulder to where Ryo stood at the foot of the servant's stair. Ryo had a hand on the wall, one foot still on the steps, and a face like a storm cloud. Mia turned.

"Whoops," she murmured, meant for Rowen's ears alone. He didn't answer. Something in his face had turned ridiculous, past caring and a little reckless.

"Hey," he said, "fuck you too," with a smile and twist in his voice and an ache behind his ribs. He put at arm to Mia's waist, and as she yelped in surprise, he dipped her and kissed her in one smooth Hollywood motion.

"Whmpf," Mia said; and then, annoyed: "Rowen!"

Ryo reached him in two long strides across the kitchen floor. Ryo, understandably, decked him again. Cye stared, Yuli swore in a tiny voice, "shit."

And Rowen didn't hit the floor.

A lazy wind spun cartwheeled through the room, prompting Mia to put her hands to her head to control her hair. Ryo seemed trapped in place, staring at the magic trick performed before his eyes. And Rowen – Rowen stretched out, his body caught in the motion of the fall, arms thrown out, one leg half kicked up, with a foot of nothing separating his body from the floor.

Stuck there, he contemplated the white expanse of Mia's ceiling while air pressed against his back like goose down.

"I swear to god, Ro," Yuli managed finally, "if the tiger comes in, you have to kiss him too."

"Oh, hell," Rowen said.


	8. beginning of the end

Note: The first half of chapter seven. It's not finished, possibly this is even less than half, (the rest is plotted out, thought not written) but I was feeling guilty. Also, it's sad how well I respond to prodding. Never doubt - I _will _finish this damn story.

Disclaimer: Ronin Warriors is not mine, but they have my love.

Warning: Yaoi. Het. Complicated interpersonal relationships.

----

**Persuasion – chapter seven**

----

Ryo tried to help him up. Rowen said, "Fuck you," though he didn't mean it so much any more, and that was pretty much the end of that.

Mia watched, with an indoor wind whipping at her hair. She said unsympathetically, "You can get your own self down."

Yuli leaned forward, with his legs crossed beneath him on the kitchen table, asking curiously, "_Can_ you?"

Actually, it hadn't occurred to Rowen yet that he might be unable to get down, and so he hadn't bothered trying. He had lost the threads of his armor's power. He felt mired in air like a shoe in a bog.

"Rowen," said Cye, crouching by his head, which lingered a foot above the floor, "_what did you do?_"

----

The war had passed. There were no more undead armies out for his blood; nothing left of them but the remnants of summer vacation.

He was finding it difficult to fill the time.

Childhood hobbies seemed too shallow. His books were uninteresting. Science fiction no longer seemed so strange. Instead, he wandered the hallways of Mia's empty house, the wooded yard around the estate, the tranquil lake. Mia had grown up with money, and it had never occurred to her to turn her home into some kind of trophy. It was, above all, comfortable and bright.

The dock rocked beneath his feet. Wet footprints gleamed in the afternoon sun from the metal ladder to the edge of the dock. As he watched, a dripping hand appeared on the metal rail, followed by a slender body, shiny with the touch of the lake.

"Hi," he said to the wet boy. The swimmer looked up, smoothing his hair back against his head as he stood, cocking his head. Water turned his hair the color of polished mahogany.

"Hello, Rowen," he said curiously.

Rowen put his hands into the pockets of his jeans and studied the water pooling at the other boy's feet.

"Cye," he said, the name still feeling strange on his tongue, "do you think it's really over?"

In the shadows cast on the dock, he saw the other boy move reflexively, putting a hand to his chest. "It should be, shouldn't it?" said Cye. "We blew the whole place up. He's dead. There's no one left to fight."

Rowen shrugged. He was surprised to hear a snarl from the normally quiet boy who wore the armor of Torrent.

"Well, I hope it's over!" said Cye. "I'm glad it is."

"Yeah." Rowen watched Cye's feet step towards him with their pale water-wrinkled toes. He felt a cool hand on his shoulder, water seeping through his shirt.

"What is it?"

He looked up into Cye's uncertain face. The boy's other hand held a small cloth bag that hung around his neck at the end of a string, both of which were soaked from their swim.

"Nobody even died," said Rowen.

"That's not a bad thing!"

"I don't think it's _bad_, just _unlikely_. Did anybody beside us even _notice_ that the fate of the world was in _jeopardy_?"

Cye shifted, lifting his hand from Rowen's shoulder. "I don't mind being lucky."

"I do. It... worries me."

"Well," Cye said sharply, "I wouldn't count the casualties just yet."

No answer. Cye lifted his head to watch the pretty house on the hill, painted with the warm shadows of early evening. Inside, a once passionate boy slept like the dead.

It was a miracle Inferno hadn't killed him. The power of that armor was ferocious and volatile and entirely unfamiliar to Rowen, for all that part of its strength had come from him. It was the kind of power that devoured whatever it touched, from mountains to demons to the souls of those who wore it, believing it could be tamed.

Rowen remembered when Wildfire's armor had fallen away, after Talpa died in white fire and the five of them had fallen to earth as streaks of light. He remembered the shock on Sage's face, carrying the suddenly vulnerable boy in his arms. Rowen did not think Sage had yet told anyone else that in the minutes that followed, Ryo's heart had stopped. Twice.

Ludicrously, they had their happy ending. The captives they'd had no time to save had reappeared without injury, memory, or explanation. Everything put neatly back the way it was.

It worried him.

"If he doesn't wake up - will that make you feel more like you've won?"

Quietly, "No."

He remembered, at the end, the clinical way in which he'd accepted his death, trapped in Talpa's body, knowing that if Talpa died, he would die with him. He'd felt heroic and selfless and utterly cold. There had been tears on his face he did not feel when he reached out to Ryo, preparing to argue for his own destruction.

But Talpa was dead and Rowen wasn't and Wildfire almost was. And it was a disconcerting feeling still, to come down from his borrowed bedroom and see his comrades-in-arms whose faces he still had trouble recognizing in the dark. It occurred to him then, once and only in passing, that perhaps he should call his mother and tell her where he was.

"Sorry," Cye apologized. He bent to pick up the towel he'd left on the dock. The string with its cloth pouch was back around his neck, and he was blushing when he dried his face, like none of his dreams of winning this war had involved an emotion other than joy.

Rowen stared at him. He said awkwardly, "It's... okay."

Cye nodded with his back turned. Water drops ran quickly down his back, which looked smooth and sleek like a seal's.

----

"I don't know," said Rowen.

The door closed behind Ryo. The air churned. The dishes had begun to float in the sink. Meanwhile, Rowen wafted in place.

Mia left. Rowen saw her glance back once over Cye's shoulder, pressing the back of her hand to her lips. There was a coffee stain on the elbow of her blouse.

"I know you said your armor was acting up, but..." Cye stared suggestively at the foot-wide gap between Rowen and the floor.

Rowen sighed. Nothing changed. Cye nudged at the empty space.

"Yeah," Rowen said finally. "_Yeah_."

"How about if I pull you up?" Cye asked, putting a leg to either side of Rowen's waist. He stuck out his hands. Rowen blinked at them; tried to peer past Cye to Ryo and Mia's empty spaces.

"Perhaps I could push as well?" Yuli offered from the table.

"I feel like an idiot," Rowen said to no one, when Yuli was kneeling behind him, putting his hands under his shoulders while Cye pulled optimistically upward. Rowen hung limply between them. He stared at the ceiling and wallowed.

The results were disastrous; the wind which had died down burst furiously outward. It pushed against the people in the room, against the walls and the floor; it rattled the cabinets. Cye ducked his head against the onslaught of air and was forced to let Rowen fall back onto his windy cushion.

"Can't you do anything about this?" said Cye when the wind had died down, bent over him, gripping Rowen's hands at the wrist.

Rowen lifted his head, blinking at Cye as though surprised to see him. He discovered it was extremely awkward to lift one's head when there was, technically, nothing to push against. "No," he said at length. "The armor – it went away."

"Do you have the armor orb?" Yuli asked.

Rowen gave up being cooperative and glared at the boy. Yuli blanched, which was satisfying but not to the extent that Rowen had hoped.

"Oh well," Cye said easily. "I'll just ask Ryo then." He stood with his hands on his knees.

Rowen stared at him, waiting for the punchline. "_What_?" he said when it didn't come.

"Hm," Cye said, watching him archly, and spun on his heel and left.

"Wow," said Yuli.

"Wait," said Rowen, "I can – " He scrabbled for purchase, the invisible cushion giving treacherously beneath his fingers as his feet shifted uselessly on a frictionless plane. He managed to pull himself to an unsteady sit by yanking boldly on the handle of the nearest cabinet until it fell awkwardly open, but Cye was already gone. The air churned restlessly.

"What does he think he's going to accomplish?" Yuli sounded curious.

"I dunno," Rowen said miserably, clinging to the swinging cabinet door. "Maybe I can escape before he comes back down."

He watched Yuli's eyes travel over him and the conspicuously empty space beneath him, eyebrows raised. "I suppose it's _possible_."

"You're no help," Rowen hissed, trying to reach for the power that had been following him so closely these past few months. He felt nothing. Not in the least bit supernatural. He realized that he hadn't the first idea _where_ he ought to be reaching to find it. The orb was hanging around his neck as usual, but it felt as divorced from his mental self as the steel-banded watch around his wrist.

"I can't believe you kissed him," Yuli burst out suddenly.

"I believe you mentioned. Thank you for that."

"Have you really been wanting to do that?"

Rowen stared at him, sincerely confused. "What planet are you from? He's walking hotness."

Yuli stiffened. "The _not gay _planet. I do not like - it's a matter of fucking personal taste okay!"

Rowen winked. "Then stop talking like I'm insane for thinking something you don't, eh?"

"Okay, okay, fine." Yuli retreated, wrapping his arms around his knees and looking all of six. Rowen felt a passing moment of guilt.

"You bet its fine," he muttered.

Cye swept around the corner from the back stairs at that moment, regal and subtly full of violence. He came to an intimidating halt at the end of the kitchen counter, and cocked one ankle over the other in a mockery of nonchalance. He spread his hands, one on the counter, the other on the wooden back of a chair.

"Well," he said, voice acid and distinctly green, "_he says you're thinking of the wrong person."_

Rowen, who had never seen Cye legitimately jealous before, was struck dumb. Yuli saw Cye's mood in Rowen's reaction and wasted no time escaping, standing smoothly to slip from the room in an unusual display of grace and poise.

Rowen said finally, "Did he... uh... did he say who exactly I was thinking of so erroneously?"

"He didn't." Uncertainty passed over Cye's face, then reformed into stoic displeasure. "Not that it matters to me. I have no idea what goes on in your head."

He heard someone coming slowly down the steps. Ryo turned the corner.

"Your advice," Rowen pronounced, clinging to his cabinet door. "IT WAS NOT HELPFUL." At the very least, Ryo's appearance caused Cye to deflate minutely. Though Rowen did not like the way he was so _defeated_ about it.

Ryo, who had been looking mildly tolerant until Rowen spoke, glowered. "Try harder," he suggested.

"Oh, thanks!"

"No," Ryo insisted, and seemed to forget to appear upset. "_Really_."

Cye stepped to one side, turning towards Ryo curiously. His hand still gripped the chair back and his shoulders were unmistakably rigid under his jacket. Rowen grimaced at the both of them.

"What are you talking about – " he started.

Light flared with sudden warmth beneath his bangs. The winds cut off abruptly; he lost the feeling of invulnerable goose down at his back. Air became as solid as air ought to be, and he dropped to the foot to the floor in an ungainly sprawl, feeling the impact in his tailbone and the heels of his feet. He fell against the half open cabinet, his head banged against the door, he clutched the handle of the cabinet door in one shaky hand. Ryo watched Rowen push himself disoriented to his knees. Then he shook himself out of some kind of stupor and disappeared up the stairs.

Cye gaped. "Well," he said with forced brightness, "that worked!"

----

The wood of the dock was warm against his legs. The boy who wore the Armor of Torrent sat nearby, dangling his feet in the water as he sang to himself.

Rowen didn't know him at all. Only that Cye would die for him and that he would do the same. It was a strangely uncomfortable foundation for a friendship.

Tuesday brought the count up to four days. Four days, or the better part of a week, that Ryo had laid like a corpse in a silent room. Rowen avoided the room when duty didn't drive him to it, finding Ryo's stillness unnerving.

The singing stopped.

"Mia's gone to the grocery store," said Cye. "She says everything's open again. It's like we dreamed up everything except each other."

It wasn't the first time someone had made that observation. Rowen found it less bothersome than the niggling awareness that they had no way of knowing what was going on in the remains of Talpa's dynasty. Armies could be mustering, new tyrants could be rising, and in an hour or two, the sun would still set peacefully over the little lake behind Mia's house.

The sun shone deep orange on the water, silhouetting Torrent's body against the lake with the wind picking at his hair. Rowen lay back with his hands behind his head and asked hesitantly, "What happens now?"

The red headed boy opened his hands, leaving the fingers interwined. Reflected water lights danced on the shadowed inside of his palms from the pale marble resting there. "I want to put this away," he said. "I don't want to need it anymore."

He twisted, sitting side-saddle at the edge of the dock, and lifted his head. Rowen imagined himself through Cye's changing eyes, thinking he would almost look relaxed, stretched out across the dock. He felt uncomfortable and strangely guilty under Cye's gaze. He let his head fall back onto his hands, linked behind his head on the dock.

"Won't you be happy to get rid of it?" asked Cye. "Not to have to fight?"

Rowen said nothing, staring at the clear sky, which was a deep blue in the late afternoon. He found it mesmerizing. His hair was the wrong color entirely.

"I don't like fighting with it," Cye added. "I don't like that I have it _so_ I can fight. Like I drew the short straw to do a job I'm not suited for." His voice rang out more strongly, echoing across the water, "I can't imagine anything in life that hurts more than killing to survive. Winning that competition is living in a way that makes me feel less alive."

The sound fell away. Rowen frowned. "The battles that we fought would have been inevitable with or without the armor," he said reasonably. "The difference is that the armor gives me – gives us - the strength to fight. And..." He found himself staring at a fragment of cloud.

Above him, blue vastness stretched away from him in all directions, unreachable and yet within his grasp, as though he were on the edge of falling into it. Even indoors, the unimaginable size of it was a niggling itch at the back of his thoughts. It was a heady feeling. The feeling of a strange, otherwordly armor.

"It's something I need," he concluded. "To feel the sky."

"Oh. Yes," said Cye, stilted, like he was being pricked by his own words. "I can see how that works."

Rowen turned to stare at him.

"Using the Armor of Torrent makes me feel like an alien," the other boy explained quietly. "Like I don't belong someplace breathing air."

Cye slapped with palms together around the armor orb with a snap. Rowen was already jerking up, pushing at the rough wood and staring at the boy with the strange eyes like Cye had handed Rowen something dangerous.

Rowen opened his mouth and said nothing. Cye kicked at the lakewater. A blush was spreading across his cheeks, bridging his nose, and he was rolling his eyes shyly.

"Sorry," he said. "I don't _really_ think I'm a fish, you know."

"You don't like it?" Rowen asked. "Really?"

"Well - "

"Can't you - can't you breathe underwater? And I thought there was a _whale_ - "

"Oh. Oh, well, there is. But. Under there." Cye gestured helplessly at the lake, which was neither ocean nor salt water and had no whales.

"Do you think if you took me along, I could breathe it to?"

Cye stared at him, startled. "I have absolutely no idea. I mean, if you were wearing the full armor, I don't think you'd need to take a breath for a very, very long time - "

"But that's holding your breath. That's not _breathing water_. What is that like? Do you breath it out again like air? It doesn't seem like the armor forms gills for you, since you _don't_ have them when you come back up." He eyed Cye's neck suspiciously. The other boy appeared faintly nervous at the scrutiny. He opened his mouth, but Rowen was off again, "If you can breath underwater, can you speak? Normally, the sound waves have to travel between media after leaving your mouth and the transmitted wave has a very low amplitude, even though sound travels well under water. But if you were really _breathing_ water, would your vocal cords work just as well? It seems unlikely, I suppose, but then again, it doesn't make any more sense to be breathing water..."

He trailed off. Cye was watching him with round eyes in the aftermath of the longest nonnecessary speech he had ever heard out of Rowen's mouth. Rowen blushed to match him. "Ah. That is... there's no reason you have to like it if you don't want to."

Cye blinked. Rowen lay back again on the deck and stared at the sky, feeling his face burn.

"Will we have dinner late, do you think?" the other boy asked finally.

"If Mia isn't back yet."

"Maybe Ryo will wake up to eat," Cye said, blithely contradicting his previous morbid insinuations. Rowen suddenly suspected that Cye's kindness concealed an impressively dark and catastrophic imagination.

"Maybe," Rowen agreed uncomfortably.

"Well, he has to wake up sometime, doesn't he?"

And Rowen said carefully, remembering things Cye had said, "Does he?"

Cye's face in the afternoon light was warm and rosy and decidedly miserable. It hadn't taken him very long to cherish the people Rowen still saw as strangers. He knew that his own nervousness had more to do with the idea that _someone_ might die than that Ryo might die. Rowen admired this as a skill Cye possessed and he did not, and steadfastly refused to admit that he also didn't think it was very sensible.

He didn't mean for that to sound as callous as it did, which was why he had not spoken the thought aloud, not even to Sage, who, being most like himself, was the easiest to talk to. He liked Ryo, he did. He just didn't know him.

Cye looked at him in confusion when Rowen stood and stuck out his hand. "We'll never know unless we try, huh? Better try and wake him up now, or he'll never have time to get dressed first."

And Cye managed a grin. "Huh," Rowen said again, turning quickly because he was obviously _not_ blushing _again_.

As they were walking back to the house, Cye tucked his hands beneath his elbows and looked towards the sky. "You love it, of course," he said, and Rowen almost didn't hear him. "Who wouldn't want to fly?"

----

Rowen carried a glass of water cautiously out of the kitchen, as though the air in there couldn't be trusted not to sweep him up again at a moments notice. The windows showed early morning sunlight. Rowen eyed the snowscape narrowly, distrusting the seductive peace of the sun on the snow and the ice of the winter lake. He was not entirely certain he had made the right choice hustling Cye out of the house last night. Or in deciding not to venture upstairs. The couch was not as comfortable as he remembered it being once upon a time in high school.

He looked up as Mia walked sleepily down the front stairs.

"Oh, hello, Rowen," she said in the middle of a yawn.

"Hello," he said carefully.

At his cautious tone, she seemed to freeze in mirror of his wary posture, a suspicious frown coming to her face and seeming to remember, in thrilling narrative, the events of the previous night. She sighed, all-suffering, and paused to study him, her hand on the banister and without any real anger in her gaze, as though at a child who simply _didn't understand_.

At that instant, the doorbell rang.

Rowen hesitated, watching Mia. For her part, she shrugged, tossing up a hand in a gesture of "Oh well, what can you do?" and walked down the stairs and past him towards the front door.

He heard her greet someone and Sage answer in return. Rowen wondered what sort of epic retelling he'd be in for if he hung around, and made for the sitting room instead, his back stiffening when he heard Cye's voice join the polite buzz of speech at the front entrance.

Rowen hurried forward to collapse into a richly upholstered love seat, feeling distinctly the part of some lady awaiting the audience of a suitor. (How embarrassing, but too late to retreat.) Cye, sure enough, wandered in shortly, lingering at the other side of the coffee table, backed by another couch and a wide, bright window, watching Rowen expressionlessly.

"How did you do it?" Cye said eventually.

Rowen shrugged without looking up, knowing his clueless seemed affected (It was). He regretted now that he had not tossed out a few useless explanations last night. With the crisis in the kitchen now averted, it was distinctly awkward to be under Cye's scrutiny, a prisoner of the awareness that the man watching him was the one he'd spent the last week avoiding desperately.

"Don't ask me," said Rowen, waving at hand at the stairs, down which Ryo had not yet descended this morning. "Ryo's the one that punched me."

Cye snorted, but otherwise gave no comment about Rowen's role in provoking that particular assault. "I suppose," he said instead, " that there's no doubt now. Your armor is certainly acting up, isn't it?"

Rowen blinked owlishly. Cye sounded unexpectedly... guilty. "Yeah," he said carefully. "I told you that."

"Yes. I know," he said in such a precise, stilted voice that Rowen glanced up in confusion.

"I... Yes? It has been? I don't know _why_. But it has. Definitely."

"Rowen," Cye said bluntly, though he spoke almost at the level of a whisper, with a glance to the door where Rowen could no longer hear Sage and Mia conversing. "You said it felt like _rape_."

Rowen flushed with embarrassment at the word. He had not been prepared for how… silly it sounded to compare something that had happened to _him_ to something so dire and – yes – so indecent. Like discussing sex with one's parents. But – and he did a quick reassessment of his conclusions just to be sure – it was accurate. Feeling the armor reacting so vigorously to Cye's nearness and Cye's touch had been at the threshold of something quite that terrifying.

He cleared his throat, closing his fingers tightly around the water glass. "...yes," he admitted cautiously.

Cye paled. He got out, breathlessly, "What does that make me?"

"What, a rapist?" Rowen asked, looking up sharply, surprised out of his blush. He got no response at all, except Cye looked like he might vomit. "Cye, you can't be serious- !"

Cye obviously was, swaying above a burgundy flower-patterned armchair.

"Oh." Rowen tried again. "Look, it wasn't like that at all... Well, no, I mean it was. I had a good time. It just felt _coerced_."

Cye's expression crumpled. "Oh god," he said and ran his hands over his face.

"...that didn't help at all did it."

"Coerced is not a word I like to be associated with what we did, Rowen," Cye said faintly, from behind his hands.

Rowen set down his drink, reaching across the coffee table. "Sit down, sit down."

Something cold rose was rising in his gut and Rowen knew it for shock and a disoriented helplessness. He had no idea, honestly, _what_ he had expected, only that it was not _this._ And having not expected it, he did not know, offhand, how to deflect it.

Somewhere in the back of his mind, he contemplated kissing Cye. It might put this strange guilt to rest. It might distract him.

But when he touched Cye's wrist, he felt Cye pull his hand subtly away, out of touch. Cye had given over to caution then. Handling himself like a hot pan that might burn someone at an indiscreet touch.

And frankly, Rowen hadn't been lying. That sick, terrifying feeling of being out of control hadn't gone away because he'd consented in the end. He just hadn't blamed Cye. He'd thought Cye had nothing to do with it actually. And he'd assumed Cye would come to the same conclusions. He should know that this wasn't _about _him. Rowen didn't want him to be so _upset._

He'd said all this in some form or another a week ago in Cye's apartment.

"It wasn't _you,_" he repeated. Cye said nothing.

The guilt on Cye's face, however, that was new. Which at the time, Rowen had believed to be encouraging, but which he know understood had been due to the fact that, at the time, Cye hadn't believed a word Rowen had said about his armor. Which grated, and suddenly felt a lot more like a betrayal.

As if Rowen was merely in denial! Ridiculous, how could he be in denial and realizing he loved Ryo at the same time? But then, Cye apparently hadn't believed anything he'd said about Ryo either. Or hadn't understood it.

Cye had dropped his hands from his face. He nodded numbly and with complete insincerity. He looked drawn rather than sick. Rowen shifted back in his seat uncomfortably.

In retrospect, maybe it was unrealistic to expect Cye to feel no attachment to the relationship. After all, _he_ hadn't been coerced into it. Maybe he'd even... (now Rowen felt a certain embarrassment on Cye's behalf for being duped) thought of it as a romance.

It was difficult, to say the least, to sort out feeling indifferent in one moment and horribly betrayed in the next (he remembered the terror of an iron band around his heart). It seemed to suggest there was a lie hiding somewhere among the conclusions he'd told himself he'd reached.

Cye repeated his misplaced apology. Rowen listened with a wince on his face but couldn't shake the inner satisfaction that said coldly _You should have believed me_.

"...is there... can I do anything?" Cye said at last. Drawing himself up to a resemblance of composure.

Rowen rested his forehead in one hand, tracing patterns in the condensation on his water glass with the other hand. "No," he said wearily. "I'm _fine_. I'm not helpless. I ended it, didn't I? It's over. Forget it."

"I don't think..." A sigh. "Alright." Cye touched a hand to his freckled cheek, his eyes traveling across the room distractedly. They had gone a murky, unpleasant color, as Rowen watched, wondering again at the mystery of Cye's alien eyes.

Footsteps warned them of an impending audience. Rowen straightened, his eyes on the doorway, trying to wipe any embarrassment off his face. The attempt was made less successful by the _embarrassing_ fact that Cye seemed disinclined to make any such attempt.

Mia soon appeared with Sage so obviously in tow, that Rowen knew that Mia had led him here deliberately and that Sage had come to Mia's house specifically to see Rowen. The delay between Cye's arrival in the sitting room and Sage's suggested that Mia had arranged a period of time for Cye to speak to Rowen alone and undisturbed. Apparently that time was now up.

Rowen didn't know whether to be grateful or annoyed, and if so, for which part – the privacy or its abrupt end. Perhaps both.

"Rowen," Sage started, and then stopped, clearly taken aback by Cye's apparent misery. Rowen squirmed, unaccustomed to Sage showing so much on his face. When had that happened? How had he missed it?

He realized Mia had not brought Sage up to date on the night's events. Now for _that_, Rowen was grateful. Until he realized that for some reason, he felt obligated not to hide anything from Sage anymore and that, if Mia hadn't told him, Rowen would have to do that job himself.

Oh, fuck complicated life, Rowen thought and stood up, pointedly ignoring Cye. "Hi, Sage," he said as completely casual as he could manage. "What's up?"


	9. flight

A brief author's notes:

THE END. I KNOW. WHO KNEW IT WOULD.

This story was stress relief for me, pure and simple. I'd like to say I had some sort of interest in story quality and pacing, or just knowing anything about Japan, but really, I puked up whatever stress had happened to me this month! onto the screen (learning to fly and defy hypothermia has been a very useful skill for me). However, as a plus, I am now deeply in love with Rowen. Through him I learn to love myself! Or rather, I tell myself neurotic morons can be cute.

* * *

Persuasion - chapter eight - part two

* * *

Rowen was pulling a charcoal sweater over his head with some difficulty, holding his dark wool coat in reserve over on arm when Sage spoke at his shoulder, "What was that about?"

He meant the obvious anguish on Cye's face. Rowen stiffened, yanking the sweater's collar past his chin. "Nothing," he hissed, jerking a glance over his shoulder. "He's over-reacting."

Sage watched him for a moment, expressionless, then observed, "You're blushing."

Rowen started, staring for moment with an honest face. Then he glowered, muttering, and shoved his way out the door and into the snow.

Sage watched him stomp awkwardly down the shoveled walk, and thought of Cye at the low table in Sage's ancestral home, brushing off questions, smiling with a hidden and enviable contentment.

He'd said – and it had seemed to Sage a strange thing to say happily - "Rowen only ever does what he's going to do. It's not worth it trying to predict him. By the time he starts making sense, he'll be bored and starting something new without ever knowing why he's doing it."

No, Sage had thought. Rowen doesn't start new things. He makes a mess of old ones.

He sighed, feeling the magnitude of all he did not know about Rowen's current thoughts. He reassured himself with the reminder that he had never _understood_ Rowen, but at least in those days he had had more information to go on. He heard a step on the stairs, and turned.

Ryo was sitting at the landing in a tshirt and sweatpants, scratching groggily at the hair falling in front of his ear. "Where you going?" he asked neutrally.

Sage hesitated. "I do not want to be a danger to my friends," he said quietly. "I used to be afraid that if my armor had more power, I would be more dangerous, and so I tried to forget it. But now it seems like it's more dangerous when forgotten. I don't know what to do instead, but I have to try."

Ryo blinked down at his feet and said nothing, but Sage saw his hand involuntarily trace the pale scar around his left arm, exposed by the short-sleeved shirt he was wearing. Since Rowen had discovered it (or rather, Sage had shown it to him), Ryo had started to wear short sleeves again. Apparently, Rowen had been the center of his desire to hide it, since the rest of them knowing no longer appeared to bother him.

Mia came through in the wide doorway that linked the entrance way with the living room. She carried a sheaf of papers and notebooks under her arm, and it was clear from her face that she was livid. Cye trailed behind her, looking put-upon and tired, rubbing his temples to promote patience he didn't have.

"Mia," he pleaded. "Really don't."

Mia did not turn, letting out an explosive breath. "I can't believe - !"

"Mia," Cye said again. "He's not _lying."_

But Mia ignored him, brushing past Sage, to toss an old down coat of pale rose synthetic expertly over her shoulders like a blanket.

"Hey, Cye," Ryo said from the stairs, seemingly nonplussed by Mia's display. Cye's hands stilled on his temples. He turned his head, leaving his hands held oddly six inches apart at the side of his face.

"Oh, Ryo," he said. And then, "Hello." Ryo blinked at his stilted response, fingers wrapping around the burn scar.

At the door, Mia turned, frowning at them each in turn while Sage looked on and said nothing, not because he thought it best, but because he did not know what to say.

"We'll back whenever we're back," she announced. "Depending on success and whether I decide to commit murder."

With that she was gone, and Sage followed after.

They found Rowen reclined across the backseat of Mia's little jeep, head pillowed on his rolled up coat and feet propped on the narrow ledge where door met window. In his embarrassment, he was reverting to the aloof eccentricity with which he had long concealed an expansive awkwardness with people.

Mia slammed the door as she forced herself into the driver's seat. Unexpectedly she said nothing to the occupant of the backseat, starting the car in silence while Sage latched his seatbelt and smoothed his pants. Mia glanced at him, softening, and said sharply over her shoulder, "Put your seatbelt on, if you're going to sit like that!"

Rowen grumbled. Sage watched him through pale lashes, and again, he said nothing.

It was a long car ride.

They arrived at the snowy, boulder dotted hillside an hour later. Rowen tumbled out of the back seat blinking at the brightness of sun on snow. His back cracked gruesomely as he straightened. Sage stood silently at the front of the car, startled to find himself back at the root of his armor's power and to realize how long it had been since he'd last stood on this slope to feel Halo tug at his heart. Nearby, Mia was struggling with a file full of papers she'd opened on the hood of her car which the wind threatened to whip away.

"I'm not sure how to start," Sage admitted, eyes on the strange, scattered stones jutting from the snow, the height of a man or more.

Rowen came to stand at his side, arms crossed over his chest. "Maybe you can get another storm going. Have some lightning on hand."

"I don't think so," Sage said mildy.

"Oh. Well, I tried."

"Because you're suicidal?" Sage's tone was all polite interest. Rowen only shrugged.

"I thought about it a few times there, knee deep in dynasty mud, me against half an army. Looking for you, I might add. But this? This isn't suicide." Rowen grinned rakishly. "This is _scientific inquiry._"

Sage watched him seriously, pale hair tossed across his face by the wind. "I'm glad you didn't."

Rowen laughed shortly. "I had to take care of Ryo, you know? He was... fucked up is a good word. And everytime we had to call inferno, it just got worse. I don't think he knows how to tell us what wearing that thing feels like. All I know is that Ryo – Ryo who would do _anything_ for us - didn't want to wear that armor unless he absolutely had to."

"He thought he was draining us to use it," said Sage.

Rowen shrugged. "Maybe."

Halo glanced at the clear sky. "Can you fly?"

Rowen followed his gaze, feeling the crisp wind prick at his face and ears. "I did - once. But... uh... yesterday, the armor wasn't so into listening to me."

Sage regarded him slowly. Rowen could see him noting Rowen's hesitation to explain 'yesterday' and deciding not to ask.

"How did you do it the first time?" Mia asked suddenly, bent over her fluttering papers on the opposite side of the hood.

Rowen considered. "I could feel the armor with me for days and days. I kept trying to figure out _why_." He glanced back at Mia, nodding decisively. "Then I knew I could. So I did."

"The armor was with you?" Sage asked. "Suddenly? For no reason at all?"

The confidence disappeared from Rowen's face. "I…"

Mia said for him, "Cye did it."

"_Being_ around Cye did it," Rowen corrected immediately. Then he shrugged, affecting nonchalance. "Don't know why, kind of creepy, but, hey, flying, right?" He spread his hands helplessly.

Sage's face twitched in an interesting and skeptical manner. The blonde man turned. "Mia?" he asked. She smiled ruefully.

"As Rowen has already said, the armors are not _entirely_ inanimate objects. You would know that better than me, however. But if I take the stories at face value rather than at the value of exaggerated myths, you – all of you – should be able to do a lot more than you can."

Sage blinked. Even Rowen came to peer over the swordsman's broad shoulder at Mia's sheaf of papers. She waved a hand to encompass the dense, hand-written notes in the file as she spoke.

"The stories my grandfather collected take place over the course of the thousand years following Talpa's first defeat. In these stories, the armor bearers are credited with all manner of spells and exceptional abilities. Foresight, healing, telepathy, teleportation... There are accounts of dead men rising to fight new battles, of mountains raised on once bare plains, of walking across the imagination to travel hundreds of miles in a day, of darkness spread acrosskingdoms, of demons and monsters bound into service, and," she said ominously, "of the taking of shapes not one's own."

They stared at her in shocked bewilderment. To hear such things attributed to an enemy would have been merely frightening. To hear it attributed to themselves...

"And flying?" Rowen suggested weakly.

Mia laughed lightly. "Yes, that too. I thought you'd read all these," she teased.

"Why would I read all those?" Rowen huffed, having done just that in the wee hours of the morning while Ryo slept and Sage, Cye, and Kento were imprisoned or worse who knew where. "They're _boring_."

"Who raised the dead?" Sage asked flatly.

"Neither of you, that's for sure. And honestly, it seems to have been regarded as a miracle on all counts, so I don't think it's a standard ability of the armors."

"Mia," Rowen said, "you say that in a strange, small voice that makes me _very worried._

"No, no, it has nothing to do with you," she assured him, waving a hand in the air. "And the armor of inferno is always a special case in the histories anyway."

They stared at her. She hedged. Rowen, having developed his distrust of that armor through repeated battles spent at Ryo's side, in the heat of it and in the aftermath, understood her reluctance with an empathy that ran as deep and strong as instinct.

"For one," Mia continued, "it's never been associated with Talpa's armors before now, and... well... in the stories, it's always used only once." She glanced up at them, a flat, hopeless look in her eyes that told Rowen all he needed to know.

"It ate them up," he said coldly. "No second chances." Beside him, Sage stared silently at the jeep's weathered red hood.

"Neither of you seem very surprised."

The boys shared a look. Rowen's shoulders sank as though with the release of a burden. The distrust he felt for the Inferno Armor fell away from his face, and he looked simply sad.

"Mia," he began softly. It was at times like this, with that look on his face, standing tall and with such gentleness in his hands, that Mia felt he was a hundred years older than she was. It was a long time since he'd acted like that around her, always hiding and playing the child. She missed that Rowen, she thought. She'd fallen in love with that Rowen once, and then she heard was he was saying.

"The first time Ryo used Inferno, he _did_ die. But his heart started again, both times, so..." He looked to Sage.

"I could feel it happen," Sage said quietly, with reverence for a time he had clearly never been able to forget, "through the armor. It was alright in the end, I think because we were there and our power was enough. But I remember knowing with as much certainty as I'd ever known anything that it almost wasn't."

Mia stared at them, her turn to be shocked. "And you never said."

"I know. I apologize. By the time I realized no one else had noticed, it had passed. It seemed unnecessary, even rude, to bring it up."

"But you told him?" Mia nodded at Rowen.

Sage blinked at her in surprise. As if the alternative had never occurred to him, even years later. And Rowen's temporary bearing of nobility shattered into a wince, and Mia knew he was feeling only too clearly the trust he'd abandoned when he'd turned away from these people for no better reason than he'd thought that all grown ups left their childhood friends behind.

He rocked back on his heels, hands in his pockets, tilting his face to the blue sky. His ears and the tip of his nose were red, and his breath came out in gusts of cloud like one of the serpentine dragons of the east.

"If I think too much about it," he said, switching the subject abruptly back to its beginning, "I won't be able to do it. Reality will just weigh me down."

A gust of wind struck the little car, rocking it on its wheels. Preoccupied with saving her papers from the wind, Mia didn't understand immediately what was about to happen until Sage's sharp intake of breath made her look up.

With the wind whipping at his back, Rowen lifted his arms straight out from his sides, gloved palms facing up and joy passing over his face in an expression as clear as the cloudless sky above. For a moment it was as if for all his height he weighed no more than a bird in flight, and the wind would surely catch him and toss him, tumbling and free into the air.

Then he dropped his hands, heaving a huge sigh.

He opened his eyes, grinning at Sage gawking by the car. "You go first," he said.

* * *

There was some discussion about how best to go about accomplishing what they had come here to accomplish, but in the end, Sage made his own decisions on how to proceed, which he felt were based on whimsy rather than reliable instinct, and said so. 

"Luck is fine," Rowen said, after a moment's consideration.

"If not, you'll try another way," Mia said more helpfully.

Sage decided against calling the armor with the orb, the simplest and surest way of getting a result. Not only did it seem most likely to attract attention they did not want, but it was not that skill which Sage was trying to learn. The trouble caused by the armors – Sage's lightning strike, Cye's trouble with waves, Ryo's dragon – had been caused without the medium of the orb. Rowen had flown with his orb strung around his neck and without having to speak any mystic catchphrases or commands. So Sage sat cross-legged on a snow-covered rock at the Pinnacles in the icy wind and did his best to call his power without help.

Leaning against the jeep, Mia carefully folded her files back up and held them against her chest. Rowen glanced at her, then turned back to where Sage sat across the plain in lonely meditation. He didn't look at Mia again until she appeared at his side, linking her hand with his elbow, her files clutched against her coat in the other.

She looked at him thoughtfully and he raised his eyebrows in a silent challenge. Mia turned her head back to Sage's still figure.

"You know," she said, and did not sound as precisely mad at him as she had before, "I didn't really figure you for the type to be afraid of sex."

Rowen did a sort of double-take, trading looks between the sky above him where it was the deepest blue and her head where it rested lightly against his shoulder in knitted hat which fit snuggly over her ears. Feeling his own ears burn, he wished he'd thought of that. "Why not?" he said finally.

"I didn't say it was a bad thing. I just didn't think you'd be afraid of sex. Or men. Though maybe that makes more sense."

"I have _had sex before." _The wind had stung color into his cheeks; it was impossible to tell if he was blushing.

"You're not really _acting_ like it. Cye told me what you said."

Rowen shrugged deeper into his scarf. "Cye," he said obstinately, "is _scary."_

It was Mia's turn to stare. Rowen swallowed visibly, lifted his chin almost defiantly from the bundle of scarf, and then, abruptly, turned away.

"I've never..." he started, "_never_ worried about him. In this whole time. Not when he was fighting Talpa, not when he'd been caught, not afterwards when he just thought he'd never get a date. I never worried about him. I think he thinks everybody else has that skill with taking care of themselves. That it's average. He doesn't understand that I'm the most..." he grimaced with self-directed fury, "_useless_ person..."

Mia grabbed his hand with both of hers. Rowen blinked slowly at her hands on his wrist, startled by the violence of it. Her files fell, scattered across the snow. "Rowen," she said fiercely, "when I go to work I am surrounded by people who are supposed to be geniuses in their field. You are smarter than any two of them put together. Any _three_!"

Rowen relaxed, smiling disarmingly at a point on the snow by her feet. "I didn't say I wasn't smart. I said I was useless. I'll always complicate things. It's much easier when we're all in fear for our lives," he added. "I'm simpler then."

Then he leaned forward, unexpectedly mischievous, cupping one hand to his mouth secretively. "Sage told me that," he whispered.

Mia eyed him tolerantly. "Oh, did he? Well, I'll admit to the complicating part of that. And the rest, I don't think I'm going to convince you. So. Here's my input. It probably won't be easy to forget what happened between you two and I don't understand how you got into it in the first place, but dicking around without deciding anything is worse.

"Rowen, first response, no dithering, tell me the first thing that comes to mind – what do you think about Cye as a person?"

Rowen blinked at her, and she saw his face close off in surprise, though she thought it wasn't at her. "I don't know," he lied.

"You're full of it, Rowen Hashiba, and I know it!"

"I..." and now there was no way that blush could be entirely from cold, not with the way he was trying very hard to look at her without meeting her eyes, "he's _Cye_," he said helplessly.

"Which means what?"

"That he can do _anything._ Especially if I can't do it. I'm only good at one thing, fixing things that have gone bad a hundred times over. Things that have gotten _complicated. _I have no idea how to keep them from getting that way in the first place." And then, dispirited, "I don't know what I want."

"So you think he's all _kinds_ of wonderful," she said wryly, regarding her files scattered across the snow with comic distaste. "But not attractive?"

"Not attractive? You don't think Cye's attractive?"

Mia frowned up at him, interrupted in the middle of putting together her final analysis. "Rowen," she said, in a moment of pique, "You don't deserve him."

Rowen pulled back. "Well," he said, "That's. _Yeah_."

"That's not what I mean, Rowen. I just don't understand the problem."

"My armor – "

"I gave you dating advice in Cye's apartment! Was the armor involved then?"

Quietly. "No." He bent down and began to pick up her scattered files, now damp with snow.

"But when you jumped off my balcony into thin air because you had a _hunch_ you could fly... it was okay to listen to the armor then."

"No... Yes. That was... different."

"Was it."

He looked away from her, a disordered stack of papers dangling limply from one hand, directing his exasperation at the horizon hidden by mountains. "I told you, I don't know what I want. That's not fair. No one should deal with the consequences of that but me."

"Most people don't, you know. Cye included."

"No," Rowen said with certainty. "Not Cye."

* * *

Rowen watched from the shelter of the front seat of the Jeep and saw Sage's shoulders sag beneath his coat, head dipping almost imperceptibly, and Rowen knew he was done. There had been no brightness, no power, no summoning of Halo. 

Mia stirred in the driver's seat when he clicked open the car door; she had been napping there with her papers spread across her lap.

"Anything?" she asked.

"No," Rowen said, disinterested, ducking his head into the wind as he slammed the door, the wind making any gentler closing impossible.

Sage's head lifted. Rowen met the intensity of those grey eyes across the snowy plain and smiled and shrugged. He began stripping off his coat and scarf, and the sweater beneath. Sage watched him, startled but silent. Mia came out of the car, confusion mingling with a little bit of worry on her face. For the moment though, something kept her from objecting. It was long enough. A gust of wind struck and Rowen shivered uncontrollably from head to toe. The air was icy and sweet against his skin.

Sage and Mia both lost their silence at the same time, mouths opening to ask explanation or to offer rebuff.

Rowen turned his face from them. Shaking snow from his hair and regretting that he had not stopped to remove his shoes, he took two steps forward and a hop and suddenly ceased to be in contact with the earth.

He gained fifty feet in the first gust, not bothering to look back and see the shock (and the wonder!) on the faces of his companions. In the next thirty seconds, he made it up to 200 ft, swooped down to 100 in a mostly intentional maneuver and fought his way up to 350. He found it nearly impossible to breath. He found that breathing didn't really matter.

Up here the wind was colder than it had been below, cutting through his thin cotton shirt and the thicker denim, making him shiver with each moment of impossible flight. He did not know what he was doing. He _knew_ that he didn't. And that was as far as understanding went. Every moment that he stayed airborn was not so much a matter of understanding as it was of remembering – over and over again with every second and every second just in time – something he'd forgotten how to do.

But it was glorious. Frigid and breathless and the best freedom there was in the world and there was no one – no encroaching armor – that could pull him back down against his will... Until the moment that memory slipped inevitably out of his reach, and the earth remembered instead that he was a heavy thing and did not belong away above the sky.

Rowen heard a shout when he hit the ground, aware at some level that Sage was rushing towards him. He rolled from the depression in a daze, sitting back to admire the dent he'd carved in the ground, a violent excavation of the bleached snowscape down to the level of dirt and mud.

He lifted his arms before him. They were pale with cold and unmarked.

"Huh," he said. He felt a little dizzy.

Then Sage was pulling him up. Lifting Rowen's arms to get his own look at the unbroken skin, the healthy way they bent, the lack of shattered bones. Running his hands in their soft sheepskin gloves from Rowen's wrists to his shoulders. Staring at Rowen's head which wasn't smushed like old bananas and Rowen's eyes blinking at him with a cheerful sort of puzzlement.

"You idiot," Sage breathed. "What did you think you were doing?"

"Flying?" Rowen remembered how to grin; shook his brain back into focus. Sage's face was tight around the edges, paling into something decidely unhealthy. His skin caught the light of the sun weirdly, giving off a glare like a titanium toaster. His hair was spun gold and eerily metallic.

"_Crashing_," Sage said. He stomped a few away, then back, running both hands through his hair. His breath hissed between his teeth. Rowen could all but hear him counting to ten inside his head. Then to twenty. "My god, Rowen! You just – _fell._"

Sage lifted an arm, tracing Rowen's path through air, complete with a sudden downward turn. He turned and goggled at the ditch the impact had ripped in the earth. Then at the archer, picking dead wintery grass from his hair. He reached out, putting his hands on Rowen's shoulders while Rowen stilled obediently, though he twitched an eyebrow at him when Sage's eyes passed over his face, looking for blood.

"_Crashed_, Rowen," Sage repeated.

"Yeah, yeah," Rowen said. "Did you know that you're glowing? And did you see how high I went?"

Sage eyed him. Rowen smiled. "Yes," Sage said flatly. "I did. See."

Mia might have had some indignation of her own to express, but she had been mad already and Rowen thought it was hard to stay mad through such a stunt. Also, she seemed more determined to wrap him back up in the layers he'd discarded as soon as possible. Sage helped.

"Shoulda taken m-my shoes off," Rowen offered, shivering violently. Oh, he thought. Hadn't noticed that.

"No!" Mia said, outraged. "No, you _shouldn't_ have."

"Easier that way," Rowen protested. "Not c-cold if'm flying." He grinned unsteadily at her as she wrapped the scarf three times around his neck and knotted it at his chin. "Should fly _naked_."

And Mia could only laugh helplessly.

* * *

Cye and Ryo were playing video games when the adventurers returned. On old game on the old playstation while Cye studied a battered old cheat book and dictated complicated directions to the last secret stash hidden behind a muddy, pixelated wall. 

Sage walked in backwards, arguing with someone still in the hall. He was somehow too bright for the indoors, ethereal in a way that made Cye, looking up from the cheat book, immediately assume success. Ryo put the controller down.

"I knew you were insane," Sage was saying seriously, "the day I met you. The first thing I saw you do, you jumped in front of that dynasty soldier. The first thing you said to me, later, was that you had no idea how to beat them."

Rowen appeared, following after him, wrapped up in coat and scarf, his gloved hands tucked under his arms even as Sage began to peel off his coat. The scarf didn't hide the devilish grin or the michievous arch of his brows. "Somebody turn out the lights," he suggested with a glance at the occupied living room, an apparent non sequitor. Sage ignored him.

"Your back should be broken. Your head should be pulp!" he recited as though he had done it many times before.

"The lights!" Rowen roared. "Make them be _off!_" His eyes landed on Cye, and his expression flickered but did not dim. He stepped forward, one hand snaking around the wall to flip the light switch for the living room and for the entryway.

"You should be flattened!" Sage shouted back. And Cye suddenly understood what was strange. What ethereal quality had struck him at Sage's entrance. Like a picture with a hint of overexposure, there had been no shadows on Sage's face.

Now, in the dimness, the effect was striking and umistakable. Light had fled as Rowen dropped the lights and now it clung to Sage, in his hair, his eyelashes, the folds of his clothes, shining deeply within his skin like the most absurdly romanticized complexion.

Sage stopped speaking, robbed of words, staring at his graceful, long-fingered hands that shone with their own luminescence. He hadn't known, Cye realized. Until this moment, he'd had no idea at all.

Rowen leaned forward, nose to nose with tall, proud Halo. "I told you you were glowing," he said. Cye felt a stab of envy.

"I thought you were joking," Sage whispered, folding and unfolding his fingers.

Rowen reached behind him and flipped on the light without looking. Cye loved it for the casual gesture of competence that it was. Rowen interacted with the world around him in a way that said, so easily, _I know what I'm doing._

"Yeah," Rowen said. "I know." He nodded at Sage and the still barely visible brightness that clung to him. "You should probably go someplace and figure that out. Otherwise... you'd stick out pretty badly in a movie theater, huh?"

"Cye." A voice beside him. Cye felt his heart rate go from zero to oh god in no time at all.

"Mia?" He relaxed a little, but he could feel his heart beating furiously in his chest.

She was smiling at him, as surely and as wonderingly as Sage was by the door. But she was looking at Cye. She reached forward, taking his hands in each of hers. "Come!" she said, "Come with me!" And dragged them both up and away.

In the kitchen she turned to him, twisting her hands one around the other, smiling and then not smiling and then smiling again wider than ever. "I have to tell you. But I'm not sure how to tell you."

"What?" Cye asked, putting his hands on her shoulders to keep her still. "Tell me what? How did it go? There's Snow White with her own power source in there – something must have gone right."

At that she dropped her hands, bouncing up on her toes. "Oh, you should have _seen him!"_

Something about the way she said it told him she wasn't talking about Sage.

He thought, Didn't you swear fury and retribution on him only this morning? On my behalf? What's all this now? Is he so forgiveable?

Yes.

"Yes," he said, "I should have. But that's not my privilege."

"It _is_." She saw he did not believe her and her smile twisted without losing any of it's joy. Green eyes gleamed; long locks of auburn fell across her face from the pretty mess the wind had made of her hair. Watching her, Cye thought with more bitterness than he would have preferred: If I were Rowen right now, you could ask me for anything you wanted and I would say yes.

He shook his head. Mia let out an exasperated breath.

"He was flying, Cye!" she said.

His fingers dug into her shoulders involuntarily as he stared at her slack-jawed. Some of her awe crept into his face. In retrospect, he didn't know why it surprised him so much.

"Think of what your armors can do," she said. "Things you only dreamed of!" There were devious plans in the curve of her lips. She said, "You should be up there with him."

"Mia – " he said again uselessly, disoriented by all she had told him. He touched her hand, taking it from his cheek.

Sage came into the kitchen then, and Cye looked up, searching Sage's face for the telltale signs of his armor, hidden in the absence of shadow. What power could be his, if Torrent were set loose?

"He's still shivering," Sage said to Mia.

They heard from the other side of the door: "We come for soup!"

Mia turned away from Cye, slipping back into the business-like demeanor of caring for five rowdy boys. "He's being very good natured about this. Ryo is impossible to deal with when he's ill." She glanced at Sage demurely. "So are you."

"Mia," Sage said, as incapable of putting his feeling into words as Mia had been before he came in, "he can _fly_."

"He's got a point," Cye told her wryly, feeling as lonely as he had ever felt. He understood that Mia was trying to communicate the wonder she felt, but he did not understand why she thought it was necessary for Cye to know it too. All it told him was how completely Rowen had blocked him from this part of his life. A new and glorious journey on which Cye was distinctly Not Invited.

She laughed with delight.

Rowen was in the dining room, hid back pressed against the wall and his hands in the pockets of his dark coat. When he smiled his teeth were obviously chattering. His face was pale except for bright spots of red in his cheeks, rubbed raw with wind. He grinned gleefully as they came in.

"So if skinny dipping is swimming naked," he said, "what's flying naked?"

"Superman drunk," Cye said automatically. Then to Mia, "He didn't, did he?"

"Not for lack of trying..."

Sage pushed open the door behind her, carrying a steaming bowl of soup. He blew on it gently, comically focused and looking very unlike the dignity he had once upheld so rigidly. Cye took Rowen by the arm, bullying him up the stairs into a dim bedroom, lit by cold sunlight and snow reflections filtered through the curtains. Science fiction books and posters lined the walls. He left Rowen by the bed.

By the time he returned with the extra comforter, Rowen's happy glow had begun to wear off, and there was a tiger pressed up against his back, pale as the moonlight. Rowen was protesting vigorously while Mia carefully removed layers of clothing which he swore – teeth chattering harder with each layer that came off – "I c-can do that myself-lf!"

Cye stepped forward, unfolding the blanket as he did so, and dumped it onto Rowen's unsuspecting head. White Blaze whuffed at the corner that flopped onto his face. Mia reached up under it, yanked, and came away with a pair of snow encrusted jeans, efficiently tugging them the rest of the way off of Rowen's skinny ankles. Rowen's head emerged from the top of the mess, glaring with offended dignity. Ryo peered in from the border of door and hallway with his hands shoved in the back pockets of his jeans. Sage set the soup by the bedside table.

"Hm," Mia said and gathered up the discarded clothing as she left.

"Maybe she'll feed you the soup," Cye observed aimlessly from the corner of bed and window, "if you ask nicely."

Rowen cussed him out. Stuttering.

Cye stared out the window at the snow with his back to the bed and drooped. "Alright then," he said, and turned to leave.

"C-cye," Rowen said with difficulty, sitting crosslegged on the bed, half-naked and robed in blankets like a child playing king. Without thinking, Cye reached out and pulled the make-believe robes more securely around the archer's ungainly form. Rowen's skin was icy to the touch.

Rowen snaked out a hand, caught Cye by the collar, and pulled. Cye realized the room was empty of any but the two of them and a silent tiger.

Rowen's lips were icy too.

Cye had only a moment to notice before something more powerful eclipsed all human feeling. He felt the echoes of power in the lake and in the water running within the earth and farther away in the ocean, calling implacably with its slow, surging mass. He felt in that moment all the wonder that Mia had tried to make him understand and more because it was tied into his own armor and so into his self. Then the feeling of water, river, ocean fell away in a dizzying vertigo, left behind on a distant earth.

This power was not his own. He gasped into Rowen's mouth. Felt Rowen's chilly fingers tighten at the back of his neck, then loosen. Cye fell forward onto the bed, his face against the soft, tangible texture of the comforter over Rowen's chest. Rowen caught at his arms, lifted him up.

"I... sorry," Rowen said. "But... you thought you were the villain. It... it wasn't you at all. But you can see... It has to be obvious..."

Cye lifted his head. Rowen's face was flushed. Though he struggled for words, he was no longer stuttering. He blinked down at Cye as though fighting shock or intoxication. His pupils had dilated so wide as to devour their irises in blackness.

"You're right," Cye said. He could still feel the armor stirring within his chest, calling out to its kin. "We shouldn't do this. If that's what it's like, and you can't stop it... you're obviously not in control of yourself."

He pushed himself up away from Rowen. He did not touch Rowen's skin or reach out to trace a blue curl that fell between Rowen's eyes. He was mostly lost in thought, and so he was surprised to look up and see Rowen so unhappy.

Rowen said, "Oh."

"What?" Cye snapped. "Wasn't that the point?"

"Yes." Rowen ducked his head, lifting a hand from his blankets to scratch absently behind White Blaze's ear. "Sorry. I mean, sorry for doing that to you. I hated it and then I – "

"Don't be," Cye said coldly. "I understand what frightened you, but I didn't feel your fear. It was a feeling unlike any I know of - to feel my armor, my world, and yours. It was one of the best feelings I have ever had. I will try to avoid in in the future." He could not help adding acidly, "for your sake."

* * *

When it turned out that finding Mia meant, by extension, finding Ryo as well, stretched out on the couch chest to chest with his hands linked between her shoulder blades, Rowen balked at the edge of the rug, curling his hands in his layered sleeves. He was wrapped up in thick socks and dry pants and layers of cotton and wool, a turtleneck and a sweater that itched. A footstool dragged to the edge of the couch made a convenient seat, and he sank down onto it, glaring at Mia's closed eyes where they fluttered above Ryo's collar bone. 

"Mia," he hissed, poking at her shoulder, and she rolled onto her back in Ryo's arms, yawning, while Ryo shifted in his sleep. She blinked awake slowly, mouth stretching into a slow smile at the sight of her audience.

"Hello," she said, licking her lips like a satisfied puppy. "Feel better?"

Rowen hunched his shoulders miserably. "Other than the fact that Cye _hates_ me, yes. Toasty warm."

"I doubt it's quite _that_ bad."

"No, no, really. He-– " Rowen trailed off. Ryo's fingers tightened reflexively, and he opend eyes which in the half-darkness caught the light oddly like a cat's. Mia had smiled to see Rowen there. Ryo had no reaction at all except maybe a small tilt of his head.

In a rush, preoccupied by thoughts like _blue_ and _utter humiliation_, Rowen said, "So – uh – sorry, about the – " and waved a hand between them in a gesture which might have indicated lips and mutual contact, "no hard feelings?" Ryo peered at him in a confused daze, and Rowen sighed. "You can't hold a grudge against anybody can you?"

Ryo glared at him muzzily, turning his face into Mia's neck. She bit back a giggle as his breath tickled her skin. The entire sappy scene was giving Rowen cavities.

"You should go find him," Mia said suddenly with the confidence that comes of being blissfully happy. Rowen eyed Ryo's hand which hand moved to cover her own over her chest and Ryo's legs tangled with hers and did not comment that in similar circumstances he might be blissfully happy too.

"I think I burned that bridge already," he said instead.

She frowned minutely. "I thought you loved him."

"Mia," Rowen said reasonably, rather than pay attention to the unexpected hitch that had caused in his chest, "who is this room am I not in love with."

"Me?" Ryo suggested from the vicinity of Mia's neck.

Rowen stared at him.

"You're-–_obsessed_ with me," Ryo accused, lifting his head to watch Rowen with his cheek resting on Mia's hair.

"Gosh," Rowen said finally. "I bet that feels awkward."

Ryo hid his face in Mia's hair, groaning, and she started giggling for entirely different reasons. "Yeah," he grumbled into Mia's skin, causing another rush of breathless giggles. "_Kind_ _of_."

Rowen dropped his head into his hands, feeling exhausted down to his bones, grateful only that he was no longer cold. He thought about falling asleep like this, about the unholy cramp he'd get in his neck, until gentle fingers brushed his skin, pushing the hair from his face. He looked up into Mia's soft smile.

She said, "Cye can breathe water like he breathes air. Why would it ever occur to him that it could be suffocating? Or that it would feel like a prison to be pulled from the sky?"

He leaned forward, catching Mia's hand in his own, putting his mouth against her ear. "Mia," he whispered, "has anyone ever told you you give _really optimistic_ advice when you're horny?"

And then she started laughing and Ryo asked what about except he was still speaking against her skin and Rowen supposed that didn't help with either the laughing or the... well. So he got up and stole Mia's car keys on the way out because her jeep was better in the snow than his little car and he'd prefer not to die in a wreck while he was looking for Cye.

Because maybe really optimistic advice was better than no advice at all. And besides, his natural pessimism would even things out in the end.

* * *

The plan bottomed out sometime around the point where Rowen realized for it to work, Cye had to be someplace where he could be _found._ After a respectable time period of unanswered calls and unsuccessful searches, he found himself on Kento's doorstep, cell phone held dejectedly against his ear. Kento's mother woke Kento up, and when Hardrock stumbled down the steps, Rowen stood up from the couch and thrust the cell phone at him. 

Kento said, "Gotcha covered," like he knew what the hell was going on, folding his hand over Rowen's cell, closing it in Rowen's hand. Rowen paced while Kento dialed from the house phone in the corner. There was chatting and less than serious reprimanding and when Kento held out the phone, Rowen heard the click on the line before he'd even reached for it. Kento pulled it back, looking sheepishly pink.

"I am so depressed," Rowen told the wall behind Kento's head.

"Look," Kento began, "apparently you're the moodiest boyfriend ever–-which I was _not_ expecting–-and I guess he's teasing the hell out of you." He added, "In a slighty malicious and petty way."

"Great," Rowen said, running a thumb over the silver edges of his tiny flip phone.

"He left yesterday for his mom's house," Kento was saying. "In Yamaguchi. He won't be back until after Christmas." He said some other things like "You going home?" and "See you at Mia's then," and also "We probably shouldn't get the tiger drunk this year."

Rowen nodded almost politely and headed for the door.

Cye answered his phone once later that evening to say, "Why would I be angry? I thought we _did_ talk about it. Call me back in a week," and after that his voice mail message politely informed all callers that he would be unreachable until after New Year's. Rowen went back to his apartment and screamed into his pillow.

Things were different after the flight at the Pinnacles. He was cold all the time, like another layer of clothing against his skin. Not uncomfortable, but omnipresent. He jumped up half a flight of stairs at work the next day without thinking about it and, after checking for witnesses, was almost gleeful the rest of the day. He also resolved to avoid official doctor types with official thermometers and official scales (the scale in the bathroom thought he weighed slightly more than his mother's cat) and official ideas about healthy human bodies until further notice.

After that it was Christmas Eve and he was technically on vacation.

"Mia," he said, and she turned with a smile that reminded him of finding an unexpected home. His fingers clenched nervously around the picture frame.

"So... I..." He held it out. "I don't think I need this anymore."

Mia curled her fingers over the edge, mug poised by her chin. When she smiled, her eyes crinkled. "I always feel like I'm taking shots in the dark with you," she said nonsensically. "Throwing rocks in the right direction and having no idea what they'll hit or what will happen when they do."

Rowen shrugged. Talking to Mia was throwing rocks at a VCR and never knowing when he'd hit 'play' on the sweeping character statements. He ducked his head and so he didn't see her leaning forward, pressing her lips to the side of his mouth in a sweet, silent gesture that smoothed out the edges of his anxiety like no one but Mia had ever been able to do. She smelled of chocolate and perfume.

There was only one thing to do after that.

Rowen flew to Yamaguchi.

Or rather, that was the plan. He waited until the tiger wasn't looking and Kento was in the kitchen swearing up and down that really! he knew how to make eggnog, before he stripped down to a t-shirt, stowing the sweaters in the closet next to his coat. He kept the shoes only because it seemed stranger to show up barefoot at someone's house than coatless. In his back pocket he had a folded map of the route he'd take if theoretically the universe were sane and he were driving and not flying.

Ryo said, "You should probably eat something first," and Rowen jumped half out of his skin.

"Oh my god!" He knew his expression must show some strange species of confusion because he wanted to glare but thought he should still feel guilty, and could Ryo stop wearing shirts that made him look skinny and muscular at the same time?

But Ryo dragged him back into the kitchen, underneath Kento's waving arms, past a protesting mixer and Mia, curled around her neverending cocoa mug. Yuli was the one making any progress--stealthily whenever Kento stopped to brag--and he blinked speculatively at Rowen when Ryo pulled him into the kitchen and made him choose from a stack of energy bars and fruit. Rowen glared at him and shivered and picked the lemon flavor, and Ryo stared at him with this puzzled look on his face like Rowen was insane but ok that was normal; and that's when Rowen knew that everything was okay again.

Which was all that kept him from getting really pissed and throwing his shoes at cars when he totally got lost fifteen minutes from Cye's house despite that stupid map.

* * *

He shivered, but ignored it. Shivering was normal. It felt normal, like it was supposed to happen, for all he'd only really done this twice. Standing in the doorway, which was actually a windowway, he watched from a strange, distant perspective as Cye tugged his body inside, closing the window and generally not looking surprised at all. 

When Cye asked him why he'd climbed onto the roof instead of ringing the bell, Rowen said, "I flew," and Cye's eyes bugged out a little before his expression smoothed. Rowen added, "From Mia's," like that was any less surprising and realized that Cye looking not surprised to see him wasn't so much _reality_ as Cye putting on a brave face in the face of Rowen's perceived insanity.

"Okay," Rowen said in response to nothing in particular, and Cye stared at him covertly while shutting the drapes.

"Good," Cye said, equally weirdly. "If you're here, you can help cut down the tree."

"What?"

"A tree," Cye corrected himself. "Not _the_ tree. It's a forest. There's more than one."

Rowen eyed the curtains. "What--now?"

"What?" Cye goggled at him. "It's past ten."

Rowen wondered if Cye thought that weird powers of flight implied other weird things like urges to cut down Christmas trees at all hours of the night. "I know that," he snapped, except it turned into a sad mumble as he crossed his arms and shivered once, violently from head to toe.

Cye said, "Oh my god, tell me your coat is outside or--I don't know. Of course it's not."

Rowen freed one hand, pretended it wasn't shaking, and reached for his back pocket, meaning to pull out the map and explain the sad tale of getting horrible, sadly lost a few hundred feet above the ground because, really, he had no idea what else to talk about. Instead, he said, "Oh, I forgot to eat my lemon bar."

Cye goggled at him again, "Oh god," and pulled him down the hall to the door painted the same pale blue it had been the first time Rowen had been here years ago and inside to the narrow kid's bed against the wall.

"I thought you were mad at me?" Rowen asked, when Cye was pushing him under the covers.

"Shut up," Cye said. "Maybe when you aren't shaking so hard that you--didn't you learn a lesson last time? Of any kind?"

By this time, Cye had begun throwing blankets at his head and Rowen had wound one arm, snake-like, around one of Cye's to stop him, but now he held up his free hand, blinking in surprise at the tremors. "Oh," he said, "I am. Again," and also, "oh my god, I'm _freezing!_"

Cye gaped at him, mouth working soundlessly. He stuttered, "Of--of course, you are, you moron!"

"But--I know I am, but usually--I don't _feel it_ feel it, I just--feel it. It's just there. Oh my god, I'm _freezing._" And he tugged on Cye's captured arm, scooting back under the covers and trying to burrow into Cye like children into Christmas.

Cye said, "Why am I surprised?" and let Rowen fall asleep against his collar bone.

In the morning Cye took him out to cut down a Christmas tree. It started like this: He woke up to Cye standing over him with an axe.

"Isn't that an outside toy?" he slurred sleepily.

"Yes," Cye admitted, "but I thought it would make a good impression." Rowen thought he seemed a bit put out that it hadn't.

"Don't people usually get their tree before Christmas morning?"

"Usually," Cye agreed. "Now get up or have you forgotten you're here because I'm supposed to be mad at you."

Rowen found that strangely encouraging, so he did. Cye took him down past the breakfast table, cluttered with a mother, a brother-in-law, and two boys with an uncanny resemblance to Cye who were actually his nephews, and out past the rocky cliffs and the rickety stairs to the sea side. Rowen smelled salt and cold and listened to the roar of wind and waves breaking against the rocks with something approaching awe. He felt a weird, undefinable rise of emotion tied to Cye's fingers on his wrist.

Cye said, "Why did you come?"

Rowen couldn't remember. He wanted it to sound good.

"Okay," Cye said, sounding tired, and made him put on a coat. "Why do I put up with you?" he asked, winding a scarf around Rowen's throat.

"I'm not--" Rowen started, faltering as Cye stepped close to pass the scarf behind his head. "I was, uh, wondering that too."

"Just so long as we're both clueless." Cye picked up the axe and started walking up the snowy slope behind the house.

"No matter what my sister tells you," he said as they reached the trees, turning to frown over his shoulder, "I did not seriously consider jumping you until you kissed me. And. That was a surprise. Why-- " Rowen's world narrowed awkwardly to Cye's pink tongue running nervously over his lips, "Why did you do that?"

Startled, Rowen spoke honestly. He thought of Mia and said, "You're the most terrifying person I've ever met."

Cye stared at him.

Rowen's hands darted nervously. "You're this total badass. I mean, _even_ if you couldn't kick my ass with a giant spear--and you _can_--you don't--hesitate when you decide what you need to do."

"What are you talking about," Cye said, horrified. "I always hesitate!"

"About what!"

"About everything! About you! About fighting! I was the weakest one!"

Rowen stopped dead. Cye had turned and was staring at him with round, shocked eyes. There was snow in his hair, which was disordered and red against the paleness of the snow covered trees.

"Are you kidding?" he said. "No, wait, obviously not. Cye--did you see Sekhmet's _spikes? _Cale, your evil twin, or hey, remember when you couldn't find me because I was in space and you suggested _going on without me _because we didn't have _time_? You complete hardass! You could totally break me in half!"

"What about Kayura?" Cye countered, though his heart wasn't in it. He twisted his foot in the snow self-consciously.

"I--I _lost_ to Kayura," Rowen swallowed restlessly, watching the strong line of Cye's jaw. "Any luck I had before losing was a complete accident."

Cye turned back to him with eyes gray like a winter sea and one eyebrow raised consideringly. "You do a lot of things by accident," he said.

"Yes, well," Rowen retorted, "I used to take the time to recheck my work, but then there were demons after my soul and my friends, oh, and _earth_, so I learned to skip that step."

Cye was ineffectually hiding a smirk. Rowen added, "Which felt unbelievably scary and also like I was high all the time."

"Usually worked," Cye said.

"Oh god yes," Rowen said, breathless with the memory.

"Possibly the single sexiest thing I've ever seen," Cye said distantly. He was turned and walking down the path before Rowen was done goggling at him long enough to scramble after him.

"Mia made a big deal about those chocolates you gave me," he tossed out awkwardly when he caught up.

"Mia enjoys getting me drunk," Cye said and nothing else.

Rowen stared at him.

Cye glared.

"Right, I guess," Rowen mumbled. "Uh. I gave back the picture."

The glare gave way to polite curiousity.

"The one in the picture frame. From my apartment, in my closet. The incriminating photograph?" He knew Cye understood what he was talking about because suddenly Cye's face went completely blank and turned away.

Rowen grabbed at his hand. "Wait, Cye!"

"The one thing," Cye said without looking at him, "that I am absolutely certain I do not want to talk about is you and Ryo." Then he was stalking up the path away from the house, pausing only the pick up the discarded axe where it rested against the base of a tree..

"Hey! The point was I'm not after Ryo! And I feel like a total idiot for doing it in the first place!"

Cye rolled his eyes, the axe hanging ominously from his left hand. "Oh come on, if he'd been agreeable, you'd be like _bunnies_ right now."

"Cye..."

"_Rowen_," Cye mocked.

"Yes, fine! The sex would be hot and frequent and wild like a wild, wild thing!"

Now Cye turned, smiling sharply without teeth. He spread his arms in a maneuver that was scarier than usual with the axe gripped below the blade in one hand. "You see? Everyone feels like an idiot for getting turned down, and yes, it would nice if we were all psychic and only ever took risks that turned out okay in the end." He gestured with the unarmed hand.

"I'm starting to think I don't have any of the risks that turn out okay in the end," Rowen admitted, eyeing the axe.

Cye gave him one incredulous look from head to toe that had Rowen lifting his chin and straightening his shoulders. "I could probably help with that," Cye said faintly.

"Really?" Rowen said, straightfaced. "Because I thought I'd maybe screwed that up."

"I was getting tired of waiting for you to make up your mind, yes."

"And you told Kento I'm the moodiest boyfriend ever," Rowen added.

"Because you are! You're boyfriend who cried 'Yes, no, yes, wait, I'm afraid of sex, nevermind, can we fuck?'"

Which, unexpectedly, made Rowen grin like a madman and there went his plausible deniability about mood swings. He stepped forward, sliding his arms between jacket and sweater and wrapping himself around Cye's warmth, feeling the strength and competence under his hands that Cye treated as so casual and unimportant, as though everybody had it. He put his lips against Cye's neck and wondered whether he could make Cye laugh like Mia. "Very moody boyfriend," he murmured, feeling an odd sort of calm that might be bliss.

"Oh god," Cye said, his free hand falling involuntarily to Rowen's hip, and Rowen grinned against warm skin.

"Hey," he said. "Aren't we supposed to cut down a tree?"


End file.
